


walk the halls (climb up the walls)

by lachesisgrimm (olga_theodora)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: American South, F/M, Haunted Houses, Modern AU, Murder, Past Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Possession, Pregnancy, Suicide, background poe/rose/finn, ben writes romance novels, cousin ruwee strikes again, dangerous poltergeist angst, force bond (kind of), let the past die kill it if you have to, no one in the present timeline will be dying, pinky swears are srs bsns, rey works in salvage, sad family histories, violence aimed at a pregnant woman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-06-29 07:05:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 52,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15724410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/olga_theodora/pseuds/lachesisgrimm
Summary: “It happened like this,” his mother inevitably began, her face that odd mix of unease and annoyance after decades of telling the story over and over again. The next sentence always seemed to shift. “My parents bought a house, and it all went to hell.”Or:“It happened like this: my father had a brain tumor, and he went after my mother with a knife.”Or, with a drink in her hand and several others under her belt:“It happened like this: hospitality really will fuck you over.”Or, on her deathbed:“It happened like this.” Her face thin, her expression earnest. “The original owner cursed the house.” Her hand had folded around Ben’s own, squeezing with unexpected force. “Don’t go back, darling boy.”In which Ben Solo returns to Mustafar, North Carolina, to tear the past to the ground.





	1. salvage rights

**Author's Note:**

> It's the time of year when I start to seriously look forward to a few of my favorite things: sweater weather, ghost stories, and all things spooky. I've never attempted a haunted house story before, but I love them so dearly that it seemed right to try my hand at one. I hope you enjoy!

A deed was such a small thing: signatures, metes and bounds, a short bit of legalese. Nothing of history, no dire warnings. Without ceremony the house in Mustafar was transferred from his mother’s estate into his own name, accomplished with just three pieces of paper and a sticker from the county register of deeds. 

“What are you going to do with it?”

Ben folded the small sheaf of papers in half, then tapped the crease several times against his palm. Phasma watched him with an expression that almost bordered on concerned. “Tear it to the ground,” he said finally. 

“Is that wise?” she asked after a moment’s pause, raising a brow. 

“Wiser than selling it still standing.” He looked out the window, where cold autumn rain pattered against the glass. “You know its history.”

A tinge of unease lingered in her eyes when he glanced back to her, but she still managed a haughty look. “Not everyone believes in ghosts, Ben.”

“Believing in ghosts has nothing to do with it.” He shrugged even as a chill crept down his spine. “I’m… I’m dismantling a bad bit of history.”

Phasma’s mouth curved into a faint smirk. “A noble pursuit.” She pushed a small card across her desk to him. “Nobility aside, I suggest you call this company,” she said, her face softening just a smidgen. “They specialize in stripping old houses, and they’re fair.”

“I’m not interested in profiting from this,” Ben muttered, his hands still clasped firmly around the gradually crumpling deed. 

“Your mother’s medical bills beggared her estate,” Phasma replied in a quiet, measured voice. “Even before she died you paid for her care out of pocket.”

He considered his bank balance, and the dwindling royalties from his last book, and slowly- reluctantly- picked up the card. 

_Resistance Salvage,_ it read, in neat black lettering. Ben tucked it into his shirt pocket, telling himself he would throw it out the moment he left Phasma’s office. 

He didn’t. 

Instead, he sat in his car, rain drumming on the roof, and made the call- and afterward, felt a little sick. 

\- - - 

_“It happened like this,” his mother inevitably began, her face that odd mix of unease and annoyance after decades of telling the story over and over again. The next sentence always seemed to shift. “My parents bought a house, and it all went to hell.”_

_Or:_

_“It happened like this: my father had a brain tumor, and he went after my mother with a knife.”_

_Or, with a drink in her hand and several others under her belt:_

_“It happened like this: hospitality really will fuck you over.”_

_Or, on her deathbed:_

_“It happened like this.” Her face thin, her expression earnest. “The original owner cursed the house.” Her hand had folded around Ben’s own, squeezing with unexpected force. “Don’t go back, darling boy.”_

\- - -

Ben packed his bags a week later, settled his beloved cat with his cousin Ruwee, and reluctantly left Manteo. 

He didn’t have to be there. The sale of the salvage rights was done, the check deposited, and he could simply sit at home with his ill-gotten gains and try to untangle the thorny mess his latest book had become. His publisher had been understanding, thus far- his mother’s cancer had been unexpected and brutally swift- but eventually they would expect a book, and for the past months he just hadn’t had a happily ever after in him. 

He didn’t have to be there, but he did need to see. He needed to see that house stripped bare and smashed to its foundations, even if his skin crawled at the idea of even being within fifty miles of the place. He needed to see walls crumble and the roof fall, because maybe then he would be able to convince himself that it was all over. 

The drive from Manteo to Mustafar took a little over seven hours, with traffic. He pulled into the parking lot of a long-stay hotel just past ten in the evening, secured his room, and fell into bed fully dressed. Sleep came quickly, and with it, dreams. 

Ben always dreamed in Mustafar.

_He hoped that the next owners of the property took down those damn trees. Massive oaks towered over him, casting the yard in shadow that seemed impossibly dark for mid-afternoon._

_“The stained glass window in the master bedroom- very interesting.”_

_A young woman- British, by the sound of it, her face cast in shadow- stood casually beside him, hands tucked in her pockets. “Odd shade of red, though,” she continued. “Almost like blood, don’t you think?”_

_“It might be blood,” he replied, edging into one of the few patches of unadulterated sunlight. She remained where she was, her features undefined. “The things that happened here…”_

_She seemed to shrug. “It’s just a house.”_

_He glanced over his shoulder, watching as lights slowly appeared in the windows. “Not this house.”_

\- - -

His head ached when he woke, and he wrote it off as stress. 

His stomach soured as he choked down toast and coffee he didn’t want, but that was clearly the suspect fast food he had eaten the day before. 

The anxiety that built in him as he covered the few miles between town and house was expected. 

The almost feverish chill he felt when he crested the penultimate hill came as no surprise. Ben drove at a crawl for a handful of seconds, his gaze so fixed on the house that he nearly scraped the side of his car against a tree. Face flushed with embarrassment, he corrected course. 

Two trucks waited at the top, a clutch of people gathered on the porch steps. They were laughing, which was such an incongruous sight for the location that Ben briefly felt as if he had wandered into some alternate dimension. 

When he approached the group, a young brunette woman jumped up from her spot on the steps and waved, her smile bright. “Hello!”

He stopped in his tracks, his heart actually skipping a beat. 

“Mr. Solo?” she asked, still smiling and apparently not put off by his sudden halt. “Lovely to meet you. We’re eager to get started.”

 _Just a coincidence,_ he told himself as he extended a hand out of sheer politeness. Plenty of British people on the planet. 

The sense of connection, though, when their hands met- a spark, a need- made him reconsider. “Ben,” he said quietly, trying to force himself past fear and unexpected desire and whatever _this_ was. “Call me Ben.”

There was a quizzical look in her eyes, a slight dimming of her smile, but she quickly regained her confidence. “I’m Rey. Even from the outside, this place looks very promising.” 

“Well, it’s all yours,” he said brusquely, digging the keys out of his pocket. “Knock as many holes into the walls as you like.”

That quizzical look was back, but she took the keys with a nod.

Ben stayed outside as they toured the house, sitting in his car and pretending to listen to whatever podcast was playing on his phone. It was a cold day, but he didn’t bother with turning on his car; he merely huddled in his coat, staring at his lap. The need to leave was physical, a palpable force that tempted him to pick up his key and slip it into the ignition. 

The knock on his window, when it came, made him jump a little in his seat.

Rey stood on the gravel drive, a notebook held in one hand and the other hand on her hip. The expression on her face did not bode well.

“I _told_ you,” he said before the door was even completely open, before she could say anything. “I told you exactly what this place was.”

She blinked, looking momentarily confused. “What?”

“The history.” He stood, crossing his arms defensively over his chest. “I didn’t try to conceal it.”

To his surprise, she laughed. The hand propped on her hip dropped to hang at her side, and the desire to tangle his fingers with hers struck him like a blow. “This is hardly the first place we’ve salvaged with a bloody past,” she told him, amused. “When was the last time you were here?”

A hitch in his breath; a surge of panic in his chest. “Fifteen years,” he replied, trying to keep his voice even. 

She shook her head a little. “Mr. Solo- Ben- this place is… quite frankly, our contract is beginning to look grossly unfair.” 

“How much do you want back?” he asked immediately, obscurely _pleased_ by the idea of parting with some of that money. 

Hell, all of their money. Chasing them off the property and setting the place on fire was beginning to look like the responsible thing to do.

Rey stared at him for a long moment. “Rather the opposite,” she said finally. “Come inside and I’ll explain.”

“ _No._ ” Ben took a step back, and would have taken a second and a third if his car hadn’t been in the way. “I don’t care if the Ark of the fucking Covenant is inside,” he said hurriedly, vaguely aware that he was snarling the words. “The salvage rights are yours. Be out before dark.”

She looked concerned, but- to his eyes, at least- more for his sanity than her own safety. “It’s just a house,” she said, and his mouth abruptly turned desert-dry at that pitch perfect replication of his own dream.

“Not this house,” he heard himself say, and drove away.

\- - -

Odd.

Rey frowned as she watched their latest client leave with undue haste, gravel flying under the wheels of his car- and then looked at her watch. Barely ten am. 

“He left?” Finn asked as she walked slowly back into the house, considering anew the hardwood flooring of the entryway. “He’s not suing, is he?”

“No,” she replied after a moment, aware as she scrutinized the fixtures and paintings still hung on the walls that the entire crew had gravitated back to that room, waiting for whatever she had to say. “He’s satisfied with the deal.”

“He’s spooked,” Rose deduced concisely. 

“Very,” Rey agreed, running her fingertips over the lovely little table to her right. “But he is family. God only knows what kind of stories his parents fed him, as a kid.” She looked around her crew, meeting each gaze. “Anyone scared off?”

“Nah.” Poe grinned, leaning back against the wall. “That happened what? Fifty, sixty years ago? There aren’t even bloodstains on the floor at this point.”

“Because they covered that section with carpet,” Finn replied dryly. “Terrible carpet. I agree that we should stay, by the way.”

Rose looked a little uncomfortable, but she shrugged. “We’ve only seen the first floor, and that alone more than makes a profit. I say we stay.”

“Okay,” Rey replied with a nod, satisfied. “Then we finish our notes and start making plans. I want everyone back downstairs and ready to leave by four-thirty.” She rolled her eyes at their amused, almost mocking expressions. “The owner said so, and unless you want him to change his mind…?”

“No,” Poe replied, throwing his hands up a little too dramatically. “I won’t argue with a short work day, taskmaster.”

Rey shook her head with a grin as the others laughed, and began to walk up the stairs. “Remember to check in on the hour,” she said, one hand skimming through the dust on the railing. “Otherwise I’ll assume the ghosties got you.”

As the sounds of her friends faded behind her, Rey moved step by step to the second floor. 

Some houses just were: empty shells, holding only dust and stray furniture. Rey had been in plenty of those over the last few years, including the mid-fifties construction in Florida that had, only three months previous to their contract, hosted a gory murder/suicide. Other houses were ignored, or content, or almost bored. 

This one, though… Rey felt as if this house waited. Which was, of course, ridiculous. 

She worked her way methodically through the rooms on the right side of the stairs. Nothing too impressive, there: cheap bunk-beds, mainly, which brought forcefully to mind what little she knew of the house’s history. Compared to the dustily preserved grandeur of the first floor, the second was a time capsule of a different sort: early sixties shag carpeting and wallpaper, and the faded remains of colorful curtains in the windows.

It wasn’t until she reached the last bedroom on the right- the master, clearly- that she found something a little different.

“Stained glass,” she murmured to herself as she jotted down notes, not even noticing that she had stopped mere centimeters from the fall of blood-red light across the floor. The landscape- she supposed it was a kind of landscape- should fetch a nice sum from one of their regular buyers. “Mahogany bed-frame, large wooden chest, vintage molding…”

Unconsciously she stepped further from the spill of light, moving closer to the bare bed-frame that dominated the space, sans mattress or box spring. “Nice,” Rey muttered after her first good look at the overblown flora carved into the headboard. Not to her taste, but it wasn’t as if she would be sleeping under the vaguely sexual flower and fruit motif. 

Tearing back a corner of the carpeting revealed salvageable hardwood, the same as in the rest of the bedrooms. The rest of the second floor and the third floor were largely uninspiring- save for the hardwood and some very nice vintage fixtures and doorknobs- but as Rose had pointed out, the first floor alone more than paid for their trouble. Rey checked her phone and, finding that she had managed to work through lunch, tromped back downstairs, covered in cobwebs and dust.

While it was definitely colder outside the house than in, she welcomed the chance to sit in the sunshine as she ate. Rose joined her, digging a can of soda out of their cooler. 

“The basement is like a maze,” she said after taking a sip. “Full of shelving and wine racks- empty now, unfortunately,” she added with a quick grin. “Though there’s some ancient preserves down there.”

“No skeletons?” Rey asked dryly, then popped a crisp into her mouth. 

“Haven’t found any yet.” Rose shrugged, her expression turning serious. “Weird place, though. I was listening to music while working through those shelves, and it was almost like the air was swallowing the sound.” 

“The vibe is odd,” Rey admitted. “When I talked to the client he was as skittish as a cat.”

Handsome, too. Rey might be particular- overly so, according to her friends- but she wasn’t blind. 

Rose nodded, then took another sip of her drink. “Have you been in the attic yet?”

“Not yet.” Rey looked up, shading her eyes as she looked toward the attic windows. “I’m saving it for the morning.”

Poe came outside then, a tape measurer in his hand and a contemplative expression on his face. “We’re missing space,” he said without preamble as soon as he got close enough to speak without having to raise his voice. 

Rey froze, her sandwich halfway to her mouth. “ _Really._ ”

He nodded, accepting a bottle of water from Rose. “The measurements don’t add up in the southern part of the house, at least on the first floor,” he explained, leaning against the side of his truck. “I’d need to see the blueprints to be sure, but I think we’re looking at a small room, and maybe a tight corridor.”

“Any suspicious molding?” Rose asked with an excited grin. “If Nancy Drew taught me anything, its that people hide buttons in that shit all the time.”

He chuckled. “Not that I saw, but you are more than welcome to go touch every inch of the walls.”

Rey took a bite of her ham and cheese, chewing as she thought. “I’ll ask the client,” she said after swallowing. “Maybe he knows if the blueprints still exist.”

And maybe he would be a little less skittish away from the house. 

\- - -

Ben forced himself to write for a solid six hours after returning to his hotel, and by the time he left his suite to find the nearest grocery store he felt a little more settled. He probably hadn’t written anything that would make it into the final draft, but the mere fact that he had managed to string words into coherent sentences felt rather like a victory. 

He returned to the hotel carrying groceries, a six pack of beer, and a pizza still hot enough in its box to warm the skin of his palm. 

And the brunette- Rey, he reminded himself, who he may or may not have dreamed about- darted into the elevator at the last second. “Hello,” she said with a smile, looking perfectly happy despite the cobwebs in her hair.

He realized, after a moment, that he wanted to brush the clinging strands off of her, and was belatedly grateful to be so loaded down.

“Hi,” he replied shortly, shifting his weight slightly as the elevator moved upward. She hadn’t chosen a floor. 

“Could you spare a few minutes for me?” she asked, and held out her hands. “And may I help carry? I promise not to steal your pizza.”

Without really thinking about it he handed her the box, readjusting the other items he carried in his arms. “Sure.” The door slid smoothly open, and he moved out into the hall, watching her as she followed. “And thanks.”

“I was coming in this direction anyway,” she replied with a shrug, still cheerful. “Did you have a good day?”

“A productive one,” he answered. “And you?”

She looked too happy to have encountered any of the house’s less savory aspects. 

“Productive as well.” That grin returned when he stopped in front of his door. “We’re neighbors,” she explained, nodding toward the door on their right.

Ben bent his attention on the lock, entirely unsure how to respond. 

She followed him inside, placing the pizza on the table. “We were wondering if you have a copy of the blueprints,” she said as he began putting groceries away in the fridge. He paused briefly, a container of half and half in his hand. 

“No,” he said finally, and truthfully. “If my family ever had them, they disappeared when my grandfather died.” He set the beer in the fridge, and despite his better judgment pulled two bottles from the cardboard container. “Want one?”

He handed one over at her nod, and they both settled into chairs on either side of the table. She looked like she was supposed to be there, like he had been waiting for her to sit across from him for most of his life. “Too much pizza for just me,” he said quietly, flipping up the top of the box. 

She ate with clear enjoyment, putting away three pieces of pizza while peppering him with light-hearted questions about where he lived, what he did for work (writing, he said, and refused to elaborate), his opinions on the most recent _Star Conflict_ movie. At some point he grabbed both of them a second beer, the rigid set of his shoulders relaxing. 

“What about you?” he asked. “How did you end up working for a salvage company in the South?”

The first hint of discomfort appeared on her face, but before he could recall the question she shrugged. “Junk is in my blood,” she said blithely, and took another swig of her beer. “You’re really going to tear that place down?”

At any other moment he might not have answered, but there had been a flash of pain in her eyes when she had said the word _junk_. “Nothing good has ever happened there,” he said flatly, picking at the label on his bottle. “A local environmental conservancy group wants the land.”

She gave him a considering look. “They don’t want the house?”

He pulled a strip of damp paper from his bottle, then tipped it back to drink the last bit of beer. “No.”

 _That_ was a lie. They wanted the house, because it would be easy enough to parcel off the residence and an acre while still leaving the other forty-odd acres intact. Conservancy and fund-raising in one fell swoop. 

She studied him for a moment longer. “The dimensions in the southern portion of the house are wrong,” she said finally, leaning toward him a little. “Do you know anything about that?”

Ben knew about whispers, and odd dreams, and the way some rooms felt like chewing on aluminum foil just by walking into them. Whatever she was talking about made him draw a blank. “Wrong,” he repeated, very tempted to fetch a third beer. 

“We think there might be a hidden room.”

He stood, walking toward the fridge. “I don’t know anything about a hidden room,” he said firmly, retrieving the last two beers. “How big is it?”

“Five or six feet, maybe. Hard to tell without the plans.” She held up her new bottle in a kind of toast, looking not at all affected by the amount of alcohol she had consumed thus far. “It was built in 1890, right?”

“Yeah.” He took a swig of his beer. “By Edward Snoke.”

She gave him a kind of teasing smile. “Who laid down that awful shag carpeting?”

“My grandparents.” Before the tumor, before Sheev, before the first family tragedy.

Rey nodded, her smile dying. “Right.”

She left several uncomfortable minutes later, a half-drunk bottle of beer in one hand. 

\- - -

_“Relax,” Rey said, curling up against his side. Her hair spilled over his chest, damp and tousled, and a white sleeveless nightgown covered her lithe frame. “You’re safe here.”_

_“You’re not,” he muttered, wrapping his arms around her. “You need to run.”_

_“I could never run from you.” She pressed a kiss against his neck, her lips warm and tempting. “I’ve been looking for you. All those houses… every splinter, every bruise, every cut.”_

_Ben simply breathed, taking in the scent of her hair._

_“I’ve never dreamed like this before.” She ran her fingertips lazily up and down his arm. “Is this lucid dreaming?”_

_“It’s because we’re close to the house.” Guiltily he brushed his lips against her forehead, the gown she wore soft under his hands. “Dreams are always stronger near the house.”_

_It happened like this, he thought._

_It happened like this._

_It happened like this._


	2. occupational hazards

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thanks to everyone for your kind comments on the first chapter. I feel very grateful to be surrounded by such encouraging readers.

It happened like this: they bought a house that Anakin loved, and Padmé was willing to love it for his sake even if the shadows seemed too dark and the stained glass bathed their bed in an uncanny red. 

“Like some old brothel,” she teased, running her fingers through her husband’s hair as he rested with his head on her breasts. “Complete with the most lurid carved bed I’ve ever seen. If it weren’t heavy as sin I would have insisted on hauling it up to the attic.”

He peeked up at her, a smile on his face as he leered in a way that was clearly supposed to be ridiculous. “Those ruffled petals and phallic stamens don’t inspire you?”

“They inspire me to look elsewhere,” she replied with a laugh, grinning as he hardened against her thigh. “Again?”

“I’m going to give you somewhere else to look,” he quipped, rising to loom over her. “Like the sheets.”

He took her from behind as the afternoon sun poured in through the windows, casting red light over them both. It was good, _so_ good; Anakin holding her firmly and murmuring sweetly filthy things in her ear as she took every bit of pleasure he had to offer. 

Later, as her belly rounded, she would count back and think, _yes, then._

\- - -

Rey woke, staring up at the shadowed ceiling of her hotel room, her brow furrowed. A phantom arm- a comforting one- still seemed to be curved over her waist. 

He was almost stupidly attractive, she thought as she considered and weighed wisps of her dream. Not a surprise that she would dream of being cuddled against that chest, or dream that he smelled of something warm and delicious. Not a surprise that she would dream of his mouth against her skin, even if only against her forehead. Rey had never been tempted to get involved with a client before, but she supposed there was a first time for everything. 

She carried the remembrance of the dream through breakfast, through the drive, and finally pushed it aside as best she could after stepping over the threshold. 

“Care to explore the attic with me?” she asked Finn, testing the beam of her torch. The day was overcast, and in her experience attics were almost always badly lit. 

“You really know how to make a man’s heart sing,” he replied with a dramatic sigh. “Let us ascend to the ancestral home of brown recluses.”

She shook her head with a snort. “You’ve been spending too much time with Poe.”

“Maybe,” he admitted, a sly smile curving over his mouth. “He tends to rub off on people.”

Rey laughed, holding up her hands in defeat as they reached the second floor. “Spare me the details of your sex life, please.”

Finn’s smile shifted to a good-natured grin. “It would only make you jealous,” he teased, then dropped the subject entirely. 

Rey’s first impression of the attic was of dust and dim, watery light leaking in from dormer windows on either end of the room. Shadows pooled around dark lumps that a quick check with her torch revealed to be shrouded furniture. 

“Promising,” she said, satisfied, and moved forward to pull a dust-cloth from what she suspected to be a wardrobe. 

It happened quickly. The cloth snagged, the tall lump teetered, and Rey instinctively threw herself to the side as the item fell to the floor with a deafening crash. 

“ _Shit._ ” More an undignified yelp than Rey would have liked. “Dammit,” she bit out, pulling herself unsteadily to her feet. Finn was by her side in seconds, worry on his face. “I’m fine,” she said before he could ask, hearing hurried footfalls come rushing up the stairs. “Are you okay?”

“My best friend nearly got flattened, but other than that, yeah.” His eyes widened when he saw her left arm. “I hope your tetanus shot is up to date.”

The pain made itself known, then, as the adrenaline racing through her body began to subside. Something had torn through cloth and flesh, leaving a jagged, bleeding wound near her shoulder. Rey winced. Another scar, another set of stitches. 

Poe and Rose spilled into the room, both breathing hard from the unexpected sprint. “Starting demolition early?” Poe asked, the flippant question offset by the remnants of the panicked expression he wore. 

Rose darted around the wreckage, aiming the beam of her torch on Rey’s injured arm. “You like to get the most out of your health insurance, don’t you?” she asked, grimacing at the spreading bloodstain. “Come on; I’ll drive you to urgent care.”

Rey nodded, resigned to losing a day. “Stick together,” she ordered Finn and Poe as she followed Rose to the steps. “Just in case the furniture tries to kill anyone else.”

“Is this motherfucking ironwood?” she heard Poe ask in disbelief as they made their way down the stairs, and shivered. 

“I’ll be fine,” she said when Rose glanced her way, and after a moment Rose nodded. 

Outside, it began to rain. 

\- - -

His hero and heroine were snowbound alone in a cabin, and they wouldn’t stop fighting.

Ben sat back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. Characters, in his experience, were like cats: completely unwilling to be herded in any one direction, and annoyingly stubborn when it came to pursuing their own agenda. 

Apparently, the current agenda involved them being at each others’ throats.

His phone vibrated insistently, and on catching the name he immediately picked up. 

“How’s the pit of hell?” Ruwee asked sympathetically, not bothering with a greeting.

“Gray and rainy.” He sighed, turning his chair to look out the window at the gloom. “Is Bebe behaving?”

“If by ‘behaving’ you mean sticking her face and paws into any unattended water glass, then yes.”

“Standard protocol.” He smiled a little, missing his demon in cat form. “Give her a scritch for me.”

“I’d give her a hundred if she’d stop chewing on my hair at three am.” Ruwee chuckled, and Ben heard a faint mew over the line. “Yeah, I’m talking about you, Beebs.”

A rumble of thunder sounded outside, dampening his momentary happiness. “Ruwee.”

Her voice, when she replied, was quieter, almost solemn. “You’re dreaming again.”

“You know how it goes here.” He slumped in his chair, watching as the fall of rain grew heavier. “From night one.”

Ruwee hummed a little in agreement. She had spent less time in the house than him- just a handful of days, all told- but he still remembered how pale she had been every morning at the breakfast table. “About them?” she asked after a moment. 

“No.” He hesitated, then continued. “About the woman heading the salvage team.”

There was a kind of thoughtful silence from her end of the line. 

“The first one was before I met her.” He ran a hand through his hair, unsettled. “I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her voice.”

“First?” Ruwee repeated. “More than one, then.”

“The second time we were in bed together.” He smiled reluctantly at her surprised laugh. “Not like _that_ , Ru.”

“Figures you opt for cuddling even in your dreams,” she told him, amusement clear. “You are marshmallow soft, cousin.”

“I’m a gentleman,” he replied with mock affront, though the things he found himself wanting to do to Rey were distinctly ungentlemanly. 

“And sweet as sugar. Still,” she continued, turning serious, “if the house has noticed her…”

“It has.” He knew that instinctively, in the same way that he knew the house was looking for a way to pull him inside. “If I could break the contract I would. This was a terrible idea.”

“One of Phasma’s rare bad ones,” she admitted. “What are you going to do?”

“Wait.” He slid a glance toward the wall that adjoined Rey’s room. “Hope no one dies.”

She didn’t tease him for words that would be dramatic uttered anywhere else. “Be careful,” she said instead, softer than her usual wont.

“I’ll try.”

\- - -

After stitches and an unnecessary tetanus shot (her last one had only been a year ago, after all, but the nurse had insisted), Rose had left her at the hotel with strict orders to nap. “You’re about to jump out of your skin,” she had said, the truck idling in front of the door to the lobby. “Out.”

And the nap had helped, at least a little bit, though Rey still felt unnerved as she sat cross-legged on her rumpled bed, phone in hand and Poe’s voice coming over the speaker. It _had_ been a wardrobe, he informed her, and despite its tumble it was still in remarkably good condition. 

“Assuming we could ever drag it down the stairs, it would sell for a mint,” Poe added. “Thank God your reflexes are uncanny; it would have broken every bone in your body.”

Rey glanced down at the bandage on her arm and grimaced. “If it’s that sturdy, we could always try shoving it out a window,” she joked weakly. “It might survive the fall.”

“It might, but it would leave a crater.”

Check-in completed, Rey looked around her quiet room until her gaze stopped on the locked adjoining door. She had dreamed of him again, during her nap: dreamed of that fall of dark hair and his lips against the crook of her neck, one large hand covering her bare hip. 

Brushes with death, she supposed, left even her grasping for connection. Guiltily she settled back against the pillows, slipping one hand between her legs and closing her eyes. He seemed like the type to murmur sweet words while fucking his partner thoroughly into the mattress. He seemed like the type to throw someone over his shoulder and carry them away, then cuddle after. 

He seemed like the type who would enjoy wearing a wedding ring and bending all of that intensity on one person for the rest of his life. 

And though no one had ever bothered to lavish that kind of attention on Rey, and likely never would, she could still enjoy fantasizing about it.

\- - -

The next day passed without a hitch, other than the omnipresent ache of her many bruises and the throb of her wound. Rey returned to the attic determinedly and conquered it, cataloging furniture and artwork and the detritus that all houses accumulated over the course of years. The attic would make them as much money as the rest of the house, if not more, and the realization made her inclined to forgive the hulking menace that still lay in the middle of the crowded floor. 

Maybe it was her satisfaction with the project, maybe it was her desire to look at his face again, maybe it was some leftover need from the day before, but shortly past eight pm she knocked on the adjoining door, a cold six pack in one hand. 

“Because I drank half of your beer,” she explained when he opened the door a minute later, and held up her offering for his consideration. 

He looked at her other arm instead, where the bandage peeked out from under her shirt, then turned his attention to the dark bruise on her right elbow. “What happened?” he asked, sounding more intimately concerned than he really had the right to be. 

“Occupational hazard,” she replied with studied casualness, slipping past him into the next room. 

“No, really,” he persisted, following her to the kitchenette. “ _What happened?_ ”

“I stupidly tried to pull furniture down on top of me.” She paused in front of the fridge, meeting his gaze head-on. “How are you?”

He looked seconds from pulling his own hair out at her answer, but he backed away and sat on the edge of the couch. Biding his time, she thought. “I finally got my characters past an argument.” He was looking at her bandage again, his eyes dark and shadowed. “Did you get that looked at?”

“A very grim nurse put in several stitches.” She handed him a beer before taking a swig of her own. “And here I go drinking your beer again.”

“You did bring this batch.” He simply held his bottle for a moment, watching her with that intensity she had imagined so vividly. “You need to-”

He broke off, a conflicted look crossing his face, then pushed on. “You need to be careful. I know you think I’m crazy,” he said, his deep voice flat and emotionless, “but things happen there that don’t happen in other houses.”

Logically, she knew he was right. Cults didn’t spring up in most houses. Sick husbands didn’t attempt to murder their wives in most houses. Hell, Rey’s life wasn’t threatened in most houses. 

“Tell me about it, then.” She settled onto the couch next to him, aware that she was courting something- not danger, exactly, but inadvisable actions. 

His free hand flexed on his thigh, and she thought for a moment that he was actually considering touching her. “Do people always want to tell you things?” he asked quietly. 

“The opposite, actually.” Most people looked straight past Rey, and she had grown used to it. “You can tell me to leave you alone,” she continued. “Honestly, I’m not usually this forward.”

Ben shook his head, but at what part of her words she wasn’t sure. “The house was empty for most of my childhood,” he said unexpectedly, after a span of quiet that she had thought would end with her banishment. “My mother and… and uncle owned it jointly, until he died. They rented it out, but no one ever stayed for long. No one even stayed long enough to clear out those damn bunk-beds.”

He laughed a little, the sound rusty. “You know how people can make excuses for anything? Just explain the oddest shit away? My parents and uncle were like that. Every time a renter broke their contract, they’d talk about how remote it was, or how unreliable the telephone lines were, or anything other than the truth.”

“That it’s haunted?” Rey guessed, the question quiet. 

“Awake.” He shook his head again. “That house is awake.” 

Ben cleared his throat, turning the bottle in his hands. “The summer I was fifteen, they decided to sell it. They wanted to go through the house first, though- basically do the amateur version of your profession. Pull furniture out of the attic, see if there was a missing Rembrandt on the walls. So they packed me up and we all drove to Mustafar.”

She didn’t say anything when he lapsed into silence, and eventually he continued, capping the tale with one short sentence. “We left a month later.”

Whatever had happened during that month was bundled up in an immense amount of pain, and he clearly wasn’t ready to fill in the gaps.

“I googled you,” she said instead. “I couldn’t find a single author named Ben Solo- or at the very least, not one that looks like you.”

A small, shocked smile appeared on his face. “Because I don’t write under my own name,” he replied, and she had the sense that he would have answered practically any question at that particular moment, provided it had nothing to do with the house. 

“Why not?”

Ben looked away from her, toward a box on the table, and after a moment stood. “This is a heavily guarded secret, you understand,” he told her seriously, a hint of amusement in his eyes. “Promise not to tell?”

“Yes.” She set her beer on the floor then clasped her hands in her lap, more excited than she had expected. “Tell me.”

“The ARCs arrived the day I left. Not sure why I carted them across the state.” He pulled a book from inside the box, handing it to her with an air of unexpected shyness.

Rey stared down at the book in her hands, incredulous. “ _You’re_ Kay Ren?”

She had read Kay Ren. Worn paperbacks by Kay Ren rested on her bookshelves. Kay Ren, as far as Rey was concerned, wrote some of the best regencies in the business.

“For my sins, yes.” He gave her another one of those small smiles, but this one was closer to a smirk. She rather wished he would do it at closer range. “My mother exposed me to Austen at a tender age.”

She laughed, startled, and found him all the more beautiful when his smile gentled and widened, a lock of hair falling forward onto his forehead. “In all honesty,” he continued, sitting next to her again, “I started reading them when I was an indiscriminate horny teen, and after I while I realized that I loved the certainty of a happy ending.”

As someone short on happy endings herself, Rey understood how comforting the fictionalized version could be. “And the bodice ripping,” she teased, and he turned that smile on her again.

“And the bodice ripping,” he agreed. 

“And so you, what, went straight into writing romance after college?” Rey leaned back against the cushions, the book resting in her lap. She wanted desperately to read it, and wondered if he would let her borrow it for a few days. 

“Not exactly. I tried the whole brooding prose thing first- suffering artist, all that- but it turned out that I am far too good at suffering.”

“It is right there in the name.”

“Truth in advertising.” He copied her pose. “Then one day I decided to write a happily ever after. Never looked back.”

“You write very good ones,” she told him earnestly. “Believable ones.”

He shrugged a little, and added, his voice pitched low, “My family has written enough tragedies.”

The words were raw, weighted down with genuine feeling, and Rey- who had never moved quickly in the matter of relationships in her life, who guarded herself with exquisite care- leaned in, one hand wrapping around the back of his neck. She stopped short of actually kissing him, caution creeping in at the last second. 

“Where did you come from?” he asked in a murmur, almost to himself.

She answered anyway. “A junkyard in Brighton.”

“Your parents ran it?”

“No.” An ache formed in her throat. “One of the workers found baby me sleeping in an old washtub one morning, like I had been left there by the fairies.” A hesitant smile quirked the corners of her mouth. “I told you junk was in my blood.”

His jaw clenched, but he took her chin gently between his fingers and held her gaze with unexpected tenderness. “I don’t usually do this,” he said seriously.

“Me neither.”

“I _never_ do this.”

“Me neither,” she said again, feeling obscurely as if her entire life had always been arrowing toward just this moment, in this tidy hotel, with this one man. 

Ben looked as if temptation were warring with prudence, but he stayed exactly where he was. “This is going to make you even more a target than you already are.” 

It was an odd thing, to respect his belief even while knowing that a house was just a house. Wood and nails and plaster held no grudges, bore no memories. A building couldn’t scent him on her like an animal. 

“I’m not scared,” she assured him quietly, his hair soft between her fingers.

He bridged the gap between them, his mouth slanting over hers, and the book on her lap slipped forgotten to the floor.


	3. fracture

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My sincere thanks to leoba, who made a wonderful moodboard for this fic which you can find [here](https://leofgyth.tumblr.com/post/177274601243/walk-the-halls-climb-up-the-walls).
> 
> Also, I'm on tumblr at [lachesisgrimm](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/lachesisgrimm). Come say hi!

It happened like this: Anakin started having headaches. 

Not the run of the mill allergy headaches, or hangovers, or anything normal. Headaches that made him alternatively snappish and oddly blank-eyed, as if he had never seen her before. The doctor at first shrugged, then turned grave as weeks passed with no improvement. 

Finally, a specialist. 

Finally, a diagnosis. 

They sat around their small kitchen table, hands clasped tightly in the middle, and for a very long time they said nothing.

She was eight weeks pregnant.

\- - -

Ben kissed her knowing that it was a mistake.

_She’s already been marked,_ a part of him whispered as he cupped her cheek, bending his head to take what she offered. _What’s the harm?_

The harm was that he had brought her into this mess in the first place. The harm was that her blood had been spilled inside that house, and it had a taste for her, now. The harm was that she would go back inside tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, and something was bound to happen.

All those thoughts disappeared the moment their lips met.

_There you are,_ he thought absurdly, her mouth both familiar and new under his. _Where have you been?_

Her lips parted slightly, the fingers still curved over the back of his neck shifting to twine deeper in his hair, and he pulled her onto his lap as he had wanted to do ever since he had caught sight of her injuries. This attraction- attachment- had come on hard and fast, leaving him wanting to soothe and seduce in a way better befitting a relationship months in. 

Not that he was terribly surprised. The house always seemed to heighten emotions, erode boundaries. He had experienced that first-hand- and that reminder allowed every anxiety to come flooding back in, redoubled. 

Ben pulled back, resting his forehead against hers as he tried to slow his erratic breathing. Fifteen years ago he had been first annoyed, then bewildered, then terrified by the way his family and reality had seemed to fracture around him. He had never been _tempted._

But God, he was tempted by the trap the house had set for him this time around. 

“I’m sorry,” he said in a ragged whisper, standing up with her bundled in his arms. “I feel it too.” Her expression shifted from dreamy to confused, a furrow that he wanted to kiss away forming between her brows. 

Carrying Rey to her own suite was easy enough.

Leaving her there, shutting the adjoining door in her face- that was harder.

Haunted by her expression, he left town as quickly as possible, only one possible destination in his mind. 

\- - -

_An odd thing, to dream of simply sleeping in a different bed. Rey lay dwarfed by its size, the part of her capable of rational thinking wondering if plump carved pomegranates rested above her slumbering head._

_“You’ll always have a home here,” a man whispered in her ear as she sank deeper into the unbearably soft mattress, unable to move but perfectly able to hear. “I would never send you away, little foundling.”_

_She didn’t have to see him to know that his home, his hospitality, was the last thing she wanted to accept._

\- - -

“You look drained,” Rose said the next morning as Rey settled into the passenger seat, a large coffee in her hand. “Are you having trouble sleeping?”

Rey was sleeping _far_ too well, and felt bruised in both body and spirit. “Weird dreams,” she replied quietly, and took a sip of her too-hot coffee. 

“Me, too.” Rose sounded almost cheerful about it. “Not that I’m complaining; they’re the sexy kind.”

Rey smiled weakly in Rose’s generally direction, then turned her gaze to the landscape outside her window. “Mine aren’t.”

She supposed she should feel mad over Ben’s rejection the night before, or stung, or at the very least _sad._ Instead she felt numb, and numb in a way that a failed seduction simply did not merit. “We should start clearing out the attic today,” she said after a moment, trying to force herself past the night before. “Holdo’s sending the moving trucks tomorrow; we’ll need to have the first load ready to go.”

“What about the wardrobe?”

“That goes last. We might have to recruit a few of the movers to help cart it downstairs.”

It was the perfect late autumn day- blue skies, crisp wind, plenty of sunlight- but the moment Rey stepped over the threshold she could have sworn that the shadows inside were darker than they had been. 

“You okay?” Finn asked when she lingered just inside the door, her eyes trying to discern whether or not the gloom at the top of the first flight of steps was _too_ solid. 

“Fine,” she replied, numbness giving way to irritation that Ben had managed to corrupt her skepticism. “Ready for a workout?”

As the morning crept by- time dragging for no good reason, making every spoil from the attic even heavier in her arms- her irritation increased. Cobwebs dragged across her skin like phantom fingers, the red glow from the master bedroom kept attracting her gaze, and every time she returned to the attic she somehow managed to rap her shins against that damned wardrobe, no matter how careful she was. Client or not, she was very tempted to kick _Ben’s_ shins the next time she saw him. 

Something scuttled in the corner of the attic as she lifted a small table, but when Rey glanced in that direction she saw nothing.

Scowling, she descended to the ground floor, ready for a break. 

\- - -

When Ben had appeared at her door at nearly eleven in the evening, Maz had looked up at him with a dry, unsurprised look. “Ben _Solo_.” More a sigh than a statement, but still keenly felt. “We’ll discuss this in the morning,” she had said, locking the door after him. “You know where the guest room is.”

And after a night of blessedly dreamless sleep, the morning had indeed come. 

“So the house is coming down,” Maz said as she stood in front of her stove, masterfully managing the contents of four different cast iron pans at once.

“But I shouldn’t have sold the salvage rights,” he mumbled. “I know.”

The fact that she didn’t immediately respond puzzled him, because Maz was _never_ without a quick retort. When he looked up he found that she was staring over her shoulder at him, frowning thoughtfully. 

“What?” he asked. 

She turned back to the stove. “After breakfast.”

Despite the fact that her words made him uneasy, he ate everything she put in front of him, and then accepted seconds. 

“So,” she said after the plates had been cleared and coffee refilled, “have you been inside?”

“No. I haven’t even been within twenty feet of the door.” 

She nodded slightly, still pinning him with a look that seemed to see right through him. “It’s all over you, though,” she said in a straight-forward manner, small hands wrapped around her mug. “That place has quite the reach.”

Ben had known Maz his entire life, but what she was, how she knew things, was a secret she had never shared. “I started dreaming the night I entered town limits.”

“You would.” She sipped her coffee, then asked, “And the woman?”

He hadn’t said a single word about Rey, but the question didn’t faze him. “I dreamed of her before I saw her.” Ben stared down at the table, tracing a finger over a whirl in the wood. “The moment I touched her hand, I wanted… I wanted a lot.”

Maz gave him a quiet, almost sly smile. “You know my pet theory.”

“Same eyes, different people,” he said, resisting the urge to roll his own eyes. 

“Yes, oh naysayer.” She _did_ roll her eyes, and on her the gesture was almost regal. “So maybe this is meant. Maybe this is how you find your match. Unless you think she’s an agent of the house?”

Ben shook his head. His immediate reaction of _trap_ had tempered, but only somewhat. “Not knowingly,” he said slowly. “But I… I kissed her.”

“And then you panicked and left town.” She laughed, though her gaze was serious. “Well, he’ll probably just toy with her- them- for a while anyway.”

Ben considered Maz, reluctantly intrigued by the shift in pronouns. “He?”

“He, it, either way.” Maz shrugged. “Snoke built a house that watched, and after he died… well, Snoke and the house are one and the same, aren’t they? I’m not sure you could root him out of the stone and earth.”

His stomach dropped as he faced something he had not considered- or, perhaps, had resisted acknowledging. “But they’re taking out the furniture; ripping out the hardwood…”

“I’m not too concerned about the bits and pieces,” Maz said dismissively. “Spread out over hundreds or thousands of miles, _away_ from that site- the effect should be negligible. Though I’m not sure your conservancy group will find much thrives in that spot, animals included.”

“It won’t be my problem, at that point,” he replied, hoping he lived to see the property pass out of his hands. 

Maz tapped her short nails against the side of her mug, her gaze distant. “Don’t push her away,” she said after a moment. “I do think you were meant to meet her, Ben, and not just in passing. Though I wouldn’t recommend having penetrative sex with her,” she added unexpectedly, a hint of mischief in her expression as he coughed on the sip he had just taken. “Not yet, at least.”

“Maz-”

“I think the house enjoys having the Skywalker/Solo clan twisting in the wind,” she continued over his interruption. “Renters are all well and good, but generations of the same family under its thumb? That must be very entertaining.”

A chill passed over him, the mug suddenly unbearably warm against his cold hands. “You think the house- Snoke- whatever- is setting me up to stud?” he asked in a brittle, measured tone.

“I think it has very few hobbies, but tormenting your family is one of them.” She kicked him lightly under the table. “Control yourself for a few weeks.”

“I should have driven back home,” he muttered. 

“You have a tongue, for goodness sake.”

“ _Maz._ ”

“Bring her by after this is all over.”

He settled back into his chair, glaring at the woman who was essentially his second mother. “You aren’t helping.”

Maz leveled a veritable glare on him. “Not everything that happens in Mustafar is damned,” she said crisply. “That’s a sizable city, Ben. Or do you think that every marriage, every friendship formed within its bounds is irretrievably tainted?”

Ben paused, thinking back to every hotel clerk and random passerby he had ever met in that city, and eventually answered in a whisper. “No.” People lived in Mustafar- happy people, sad people, _normal_ people. They probably had abnormally vivid dreams, but Maz was right: the average citizen in that city was no more bound to the house than he was bound to Roanoke or Raleigh or Greensboro. 

“Then go talk to the poor girl.” Maz tsked, but looked empathetic all the same. “Fate is odd, Ben, but sometimes you find the sweet amidst the bitter.”

He thought of Rey’s chestnut hair slipping through his fingers, of the way her mouth had felt under his, and smiled tentatively. “Fate is a thing, then?”

“Hard to tell.” She smiled smugly at him. “Go find out.” 

When he stared at her, hopeful and scared in equal measure, she sighed and patted his hand. “Tomorrow,” Maz said, one brow raised. “One more dreamless night, and then back to work with you.”

And- flooded with relief- he took the reprieve.

\- - -

_Rey lay huddled under a bed, knees tucked up against her chest, and watched. Someone paced back and forth beyond her hiding place, socked feet dragging against the carpet._

_“They don’t understand,” a man muttered, and just by his voice Rey knew that if she could see his face his gaze would be impossibly distant. His volume dropped until she could only catch mumbled snatches. “He… fire… his eyes… changed…”_

_Abruptly he stopped in his tracks, and before she could make sense of the lack of motion a bearded face was looking straight at her. “I can hear their screams,” the man said with a kind of desperation, a hand clamping iron-fast around her arm and dragging her from under the bed, the carpet mercilessly burning bare patches of her skin. When she cried out in shock, her limbs refusing to obey mental commands to move, strike, kick, the man pulled her to her feet, his eyes wild._

_“How could you, Ben?” he hissed, utter betrayal on his face, and for a moment they stared at each other, Rey hanging helplessly from his grip._

_And then he raised his other hand, and what little light existed in the room glittered on the blade of his knife._

_He buried it in her chest._

\- - -

Rey woke panting, one hand flying unbidden to the skin just over her heart.

Unbroken.

Of course. 

She looked through the gloom in the direction of the adjoining door, and without quite thinking about it untangled herself from the sheets, running lightly over the floor until she was pressed up against the door. She pounded a hand against its surface once, twice, three times.

Silence.

“Ben?” she whispered against the wood, shivering when she finally registered the raw skin of her knees and shins. “Please.”

No answer. Rey backed away, sitting heavily on the side of her bed and switching on the light. She considered her battered legs for a long moment, hands loose against the sheets.

“It was an odd day,” she said softly, trying to reassure herself. “Clearing out that attic… you probably got some kind of friction burn from… from your jeans.”

Even as she said the words she knew they were utterly false. Slowly she drew her legs up onto the mattress, the creeping sense of _something_ lurking under the bed resurrecting itself from childhood nightmares.

_Danger below, danger above,_ Rey thought suddenly, remembering certain foster homes from her youth. She felt fragile in a way she hadn’t felt since starting therapy, and all she wanted- truly all she wanted- was to rest against someone ( _Ben_ ) and feel strong arms ( _Ben_ ) loop around her middle, breath ruffling her hair ( _Ben_ ).

Leaving the light on, Rey crawled back under the sheets and waited for dawn. 

\- - -

Ben allowed the return drive to stretch to almost twice its normal length, taking back roads and lingering at scenic overlooks before finally arriving in Mustafar with a half-melted chocolate milkshake in one cupholder. He hadn’t heard a single word from Rey, the other salvage crew members, _or_ the police, so clearly everything was fine. 

Just fine.

“Right,” he murmured to himself in half-hearted agreement. “Right.”

He spent the rest of the day working distractedly, waiting for any hint of sound from the adjoining room. His only relief was the picture mid-afternoon from Ruwee of a rotund orange and white cat snoozing in a patch of sunlight. 

_Obviously she’s miserable,_ he texted back, one corner of his mouth quirking upward. 

_Full of despair, poor beast,_ she shot back. 

Finally, contractual obligations in mind, he slipped on a pair of noise-canceling headphones and forced himself to concentrate on the problems of a dowry-less wallflower and the rake who loved her.

And that worked, until he eventually fell asleep in his chair long after the last trace of light had disappeared from the sky.

\- - - 

Rey’s day ended in snarls and grumbling, her three coworkers piling into the second truck with barely a word, and she couldn’t quite figure out _why._ The first moving vans had been loaded and sent on their way, and what had remained in the attic (including Rey’s hardwood nemesis) rested in one of the ground floor rooms, waiting for round two. By her standards, the day had been a successful one. 

She frowned down at the food she had picked up on her way back to the hotel, swirling one fry through a pool of ketchup. “Every crew has bad days,” she reminded herself in a bare whisper, the sense of loss she felt at odds with reality. “Everything will be better tomorrow.”

The words dropped from her lips hesitantly, the doubt in her voice evident. How many times had her relationships soured unexpectedly, leaving her adrift? Too many times to count. 

Mechanically she ate, no longer thinking of food as pleasurable but solely as a source of fuel. If her crew turned against her, Holdo would fire her. If Holdo fired her, her small flat in Durham would quickly become unaffordable. If that happened…

_Sell what you can,_ she thought mercilessly, cramming two fries into her mouth. _Ration calories. Better to starve than sleep in the open air._

Growing gradually more off-kilter she prepared for bed, panic simmering in her belly as she unwillingly imagined every aspect of her hard-won life falling away. No friends, no job, no safety: just Rey the foundling again, scrabbling for whatever could be found in the shadows of an alley.

_You’re here,_ she told herself, dragging the heavy weight of blankets over her body. _Tomorrow Finn will smile, and Poe will tear down that wall, and Rose will make jokes, and everything will be fine. Just fine. Completely fine._

She could still see, though, how they had closed their tight unit against her earlier that day, whispering just out of earshot with suspicious glances over their shoulders. They would still be whispering about her now, tucked up together in the bed they shared. 

The unfriendly dark took on weight, pressing her down into sleep as she continued to think _alone, alone, alone._

\- - -

_Finding himself beside Rey was not a surprise._

_The desolate look on her face, though, gave him pause._

_“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she whispered, staring down at the sheets underneath them. “I don’t- I can’t, not again.”_

_“Can’t what?” he asked quietly, shifting closer. She was shivering in her t-shirt and sweatpants, loose strands of hair framing her face. “Tell me.”_

_She slid a glance his way, watching him warily, and he wondered guiltily what she had dreamed of in the two nights of his absence. “Tell me, sweetheart,” he said gently, the endearment slipping out unbidden._

_Rey closed her eyes, shoulders slumping. “Have you ever been homeless?” she asked, her voice quiet and fragile. “The last time was in the summer. Easier in the summer; you never freeze in the summer.” A tear slipped down one cheek as she took in a shuddering breath. “I’m going to die of exposure on some park bench.”_

_He pulled her onto his lap, wrapping his arms around her unnaturally chilled body. “No, you’re not.”_

_“They’ll bury me in a pauper’s grave,” she mumbled into his shirt. “No headstone. Discarded at birth and in death; just trash.”_

_“No.” He kissed her hair, holding her tighter. “The house is tricking you, Rey. You’re amazing. You’re brilliant.”_

_“I’ll always be alone.”_

_“You’re not alone.” She was cold, so cold. “I’m right here.”_

_She was quiet for a moment, her body seeming to sap all the warmth from him even as her limbs remained cool to the touch. “The first time I read one of your books was that summer,” she said unexpectedly. “I found one lying forgotten at a bus stop. I must have read it a half-dozen times that month. It gave me… it gave me hope.” There was a faint spark in her voice again, her skin a little warmer. “When I got back on my feet I started buying the others from second-hand bookstores. Eventually I could afford to pay for new releases.”_

_Ben rested his cheek against her head, finding a measure of warmth inside himself. “Rey.”_

_She shivered again, and when she spoke that spark was gone, replaced by bleak pragmatism. “Selling them would pay for a meal.”_

_She dissolved in his arms, leaving him alone on rumpled sheets._


	4. sparks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone is having a lovely weekend!

It happened like this: Sheev came to stay, and Padmé was glad, _so_ glad to see him. He was one of their oldest friends, had been the best man at their wedding, and when he arrived at their doorstep she breathed easily for the first time in weeks. 

“Thank God,” she said with real feeling, allowing him to wrap her in a brotherly hug. “Sheev-”

“I know.” And just those two words told her that he did _know_ , that grief and a determination to make Anakin’s last months count weighed as heavily on him as on her. “I know, Mé.”

He looked down at her belly when they parted, a slight smile on his face. “Are you…?”

“Twins,” she admitted with a quiet, ragged laugh. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You’re going to be a mother,” he replied simply, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Show me around, Mé. Everything will be just fine.”

And, for a while, it was.

\- - -

Rey dragged herself out of bed the next morning reluctantly, her limbs leaden with fatigue. A hot shower- usually a commonplace that made her smile, because there had been a time when hot water had been anything _but_ commonplace- failed to cheer her. Coffee failed to cheer her. Food failed to cheer her, but she ate it anyway.

When she arrived in the lobby, looking for her crew, her phone buzzed with an incoming text.

_At site,_ was all Rose had written, and Rey knew that the discomfort of the day before had stretched to infect the next. 

Though she was in fact early for their customary departure from the hotel, Rey felt a flush of shame cover her face as she scrambled to follow, the childhood taunt of _lazy, worthless girl_ ugly in her mind. Left behind, shut out, always at a remove-

“Rey!”

She stopped in the middle of the parking lot, the wind whipping wisps of her hair from her buns. Turning, she spotted Ben moving quickly to catch up with her, his expression filled with worry. “What?” she asked, holding herself stiffly. _Where have you been?_ she wanted to continue. _Why did you leave me?_

He shifted his coat from one arm to another, extending a book in her direction. “It’s yours,” he said quietly. “I want to know what you think.”

She accepted the book, tracing a crease on the cover with one finger. It had fallen to the floor, she remembered suddenly, pages all askew. “Thank you.”

“Are you hungry?”

Rey looked up at him, confused. “Excuse me?”

“I’d like to buy you breakfast.” He hunched inward, toward her, his face suddenly almost boyish despite the stubble along his jawline. “And talk.”

She hesitated, barely noticing the way the cold cut through her jacket. “I can’t,” she said finally, the book clenched firmly in one hand. “I didn’t make you angry?”

He immediately shook his head in denial. “ _No._ I’m just screwed up about…”

Ben waved a hand in the general direction of the house. “About that.”

“Right.” Her phone buzzed again, and she saw that Poe had sent a terse question about the day’s priorities. “I really need to go,” she said hurriedly, shame filling her again as she typed out a quick reply. 

His jaw was clenched when she looked back up at him, and slowly he nodded. “I’ll follow you there.”

She blinked, not at all expecting those words. “You’re coming to the house?”

“Just to check up on things.” He shrugged on his coat, looking distinctly unhappy. “I won’t be going in.”

Rey wasn’t sure what the point was, then, but she could hardly tell him no. “Okay.”

He stalked past her to his own car, long black coat billowing in the wind, the picture of a man performing a bitter duty. She considered it all the way to the house, distracted only by the increasingly frequent buzzing of her phone. Maybe she _was_ late. Had they made alternate plans? Had she missed an email or an earlier text? 

“Finally,” Poe said when she slid out of her vehicle. There was a fresh bandage on his left arm. “Honestly, Rey, are you ever on time?”

Even knowing the words were unfair she felt stricken, but before she could respond Ben parked beside her truck, catching Poe’s attention. “What’s he doing here?”

“Probably just curious,” Rey muttered, picking up her tools. “Do you need to see a doctor?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He left, glancing over his shoulder at Ben before disappearing inside. 

Rey stared after him, then looked down at her phone. Seven-fifty-one in the morning, nine minutes before their usual start time. “What time do you have?” she asked Ben the moment his car door opened.

He gave her a long, sober look, then held up his phone. Nine-thirty-five.

Her stomach twisting into knots, she looked back down at her own phone. “That’s not possible,” she whispered, mouth dry, the time (nine-thirty-five, it _hadn’t_ been that time seconds before) boldly accusative. 

“Hey.” Ben was beside her in what seemed like an instant, one hand curving gently over her shoulder. He was large enough to act as a windbreak, a small fact she clung to. “It’s okay. You’re fine.”

“I’m late,” she said in disbelief. “I’m never late.”

“The house does weird things with time,” he replied, his voice strangely soothing. “Look at me, sweetheart.”

The endearment sounded oddly familiar falling from his lips, but she couldn’t quite think why. “I’m not your sweetheart,” she said instead, meeting his eyes without hesitation. She felt a little steadier, setting a boundary; a little steadier, standing beside him. 

He gave her a small smile. “Not yet.”

“You were the one who shut the door,” Rey reminded him, a note of irritation slipping into her voice as she shoved the phone into her pocket. “I was perfectly ready to break all of my rules.”

Practically every rule she had. Avoid unprofessional conduct with clients, avoid attachments, avoid one-night stands- and then she had given in to the urge to climb him like a tree, only to be roundly rejected. Apparently he regretted that rejection, now.

_He’ll tell Holdo._

The stray thought made her still, her breath coming short. 

“That was a mistake on my part,” he was saying. “If I can’t buy you breakfast, let me buy dinner.”

“I don’t-”

She stopped and tried again, her throat raw. “Restaurants are loud.”

And normally she didn’t mind, but she _did_ mind when nervous tension left her this jittery. 

“Then I’ll feed you at the hotel.” He paused, the hand on her shoulder squeezing gently. “Please.”

After a moment Rey nodded, not seeing any recourse. He would tell. He would tell, and the others would tell, and she would starve in the shadows of one of the old tobacco warehouses in Durham. Or be deported, and then starve somewhere in London. Or-

Rey took in a deep breath and gave herself a mental shake, gritting her teeth. She would _not_ end up on the streets again. Saving every spare cent had left her with a small cushion, and if Holdo let her go there were other salvage companies that would hire her, even if only out of spite. “I’m not going to sleep with you,” she told him firmly, planting her hands on her hips. “And it’s your turn to buy the beer.”

With that, she turned and walked briskly away, heading for the open door of the house- and behind her, he laughed a little.

Strangely, that laugh sounded almost like relief. 

\- - -

Despite the cold, Ben stayed at the site for nearly two hours before returning to town. Even from the outside the house looked smaller, as if the gradual interior stripping had somehow managed to effect the exterior. “How is it going?” he asked one of the other crew members- Rose, he thought- when she walked out to the truck for a bottle of water. 

The look of faint worry on her face didn’t dissipate, but she answered easily enough. “Good. Attic’s done. By the end of next week we’ll have the second and third stories finished, then it’ll be another two weeks or so to take care of the first floor and basement.” 

She smiled with genuine enthusiasm, looking as if she were sharing a secret with him. “Depends on what’s behind that mystery wall.”

He had almost forgotten that bit of information. “What do you think is back there?” he asked, trying for bland curiosity and barely succeeding. 

“Old servant stairs, probably,” she replied with a shrug. “We’ve found a few hidden rooms before, but they’ve never been exciting. Lots of dust.”

She was beginning to look a little more relaxed, more like the woman he had spotted only days before. “Listen, I know I’m weird about this house,” he said bluntly, guessing that dancing around the subject would not work well in this situation. “The mood isn’t, uh-”

“Affecting us?” Rose tilted her hand in a visual _comme-ci, comme-ça_. “I won’t lie, the house is kind of creepy, and we’re all a bit grouchy right now, but that happens sometimes. We’ll power through it eventually.” She laughed a little. “Though I will admit, this might be the one time I would have preferred to _not_ know the history. I’ve even been dreaming about it.”

“Encouraging you to leave early won’t help, will it?” he asked, and she gave him a surprisingly sympathetic look, one that didn’t rouse defensiveness in him. 

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said quietly. “My sister, though- if anyone asked her she would quote Hamlet at them.”

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy’,” he replied in a murmur.

“Exactly.” She sipped her water, her eyes shadowed. “She died a few years ago,” Rose added. “I admit that for a while, I kind of… hoped.”

And he could understand how that would be a tempting idea, for someone who hadn’t spent a very formative month in a haunted house. “Be careful in there,” he said after a moment. “If anything happens, call me immediately.”

“We will.” Rose gathered an armful of bottled water, clearly planning to distribute it amongst her comrades. “Don’t worry, Mr. Solo,” she continued with a wry smile. “We ain’t afraid of no ghosts.”

\- - -

“Hey.”

Rey looked away from the light fixture she was about to remove to find Poe below her, an embarrassed expression on his face. “I was a dick this morning,” he said bluntly, running a hand through his hair. “And not even a truthful one, because you’re always early. I’m sorry, Rey.”

The tension in her shoulders eased. “Don’t worry about it.” She climbed down the ladder to join him. “You okay?”

Poe shrugged. “Just kind of on edge. Like… like it’s about to storm.” He laughed self-consciously. “Weird thing to say, I know.”

“No, I get it.” Rey looked down the hall, taking in all the door-less thresholds and the walls stripped of molding. She could hear Rose whistling somewhere nearby, the sound strangely flat. “This place is… odd.”

“It really, really is.” He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Anyway, I’ll try to be less of a jerk from now on.”

“And I’ll be more careful setting my alarm.” Rey checked her phone as she spoke, brow creasing when she saw that her cell reception- normally a solid three bars, at worst- had dropped to zero. “We’ve got the weekend coming, at least.”

“Yeah, about that- we’re going to head over to Flat Rock after work.” Poe looked more cheerful as he spoke the words, leaning back against the wall. “Interested?”

Rey laughed, shaking her head. “No, thank you. Take your romantic weekend; I will stay in town and watch an unholy amount of cable tv.”

Poe’s smile shifted to something almost wicked. “ _Really._ ”

She raised a brow, hiding her amusement and the creeping hint of panic she felt. “Really.”

“Okay.” He sauntered toward the stairs, grinning. “Enjoy your solo time.”

The choice of wording was not at all coincidental. “Poe-”

“He is _very_ handsome.”

“ _Poe._ ”

“Rose and Finn think so, too.” He disappeared down the stairs before she could do more than groan in annoyance. “Have fun!”

Rey glared down the hall, then begrudgingly returned to work. When she reached out to touch the fixture an unexpected spark made her hiss and grab at the ladder, which wobbled slightly underneath her. Scrambling back down the rungs she cursed quietly, wondering how in the hell power had been restored to this particular portion of the house.

Assuming she had ever turned the breaker off at all. 

Uncertain, Rey stopped halfway to the stairs. She had, hadn’t she? She could almost see herself flipping the breaker, feel the grooves of the switch against her fingers. And she had been working for several minutes before Poe appeared with nary a spark.

Suddenly Rose leaned out of one of the doorways, a smile on her face. “Lunch?” she asked, her usual good-natured self. 

Rey took in a breath, deciding questions of breakers could be answered after calories. “Lunch,” she agreed, forcing herself not to look back at the light fixture which dangled innocuously behind them. “I really, really want some crisps.”

“I really want some caffeine,” Rose replied, slinging an arm over her shoulder when Rey drew even. 

“Yeah.” She leaned briefly against Rose’s side. “Me, too.” Rey took in a breath, calmed by Rose’s steady presence. “So,” she said as they walked down the stairs. “Flat Rock, huh?”

“I’m going to wreck them,” Rose confided seriously. “It’s going to be great.”

Rey snickered. “As long as they can pull up hardwood on Monday, I don’t care what you do to them.”

“Don’t worry, I’m aiming for tension-reducing wrecking.” Rose gave her a playful look. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Do that, but don’t give me the specifics.” Rey slipped out of Rose’s loose hold, moving quickly toward the exit. “I’m _starving._ ”

“You’re always starving,” Rose replied with a laugh, and Rey had the ridiculous thought that maybe- maybe- a kind of curious gaze sharpened at those words. 

And, as if on cue, her stomach grumbled. 

\- - -

The knock, when it came, was a more than welcome distraction. Ben glared at the screen of his laptop as he saved his work, irritated by his lack of progress. He knew _exactly_ how the climactic reveal should go- could almost visualize it in his head- but every word he put on the page was flat and lifeless. 

_Tomorrow,_ he thought grimly as he crossed to the door. _Tomorrow I’ll rewrite the whole chapter._

“Hi.” Rey stood on her side of the threshold, hair damp and skin glowing in a freshly scrubbed way that distracted him with thoughts of dirtying her up a little. “So.”

“So.” He considered Rey for a second longer, relaxing at the mere sight of her, and then bent, brushing a kiss against her lips. “Hungry?”

Her gaze flicked to the kitchenette behind him, the food waiting there a clear draw, and then back to him. Her expression was that of weary confusion, and he resisted the urge to stroke her hair in response. “What are we doing, Ben?”

It was a valid question, and one he was unsure how to answer. Ben took her hand, his eyes cast down to examine the fine-boned structure of her inner wrist. “The first time you sat across from me, I felt as if I’d been waiting for you to take that place for years,” he admitted quietly, stroking his thumb over her pulse point. “And it scared me, especially considering where we are and why we’re here.” He shrugged slightly, lifting his head to meet her gaze. “But I can’t seem to stay away from you.”

After a moment she nodded, her confusion replaced with almost reluctant understanding. “I know. I-”

Rey stopped, then blurted out, “Are you going to tell my boss?”

“God, no,” he replied immediately, startled by the idea. “No matter what happens, I won’t breathe a word about this.”

“Okay.” She nodded and offered up a slight smile. “Okay.”

He caressed her inner wrist with his thumb one last time, then released her hand. “If you prefer, you can just get some food and lock the door again.” 

“No, I want company.” She moved past him into the room, heading straight for the bags on the counter. “I feel the same,” she admitted, her back to him. “People have always left me, eventually, but the moment we kissed I had the most ridiculous thought.” Rey laughed a little, glancing over her shoulder as if inviting him to join in. “‘This one’s going to stay.’”

And then, of course, he had immediately skipped town. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She began piling her plate with fried rice and egg rolls, moving with the kind of reflexive caution that seemed enforced by years of habit, as if dropping one grain of rice would result in some kind of punishment. “It was just a moment of wishful thinking. I know better than that.”

“Will you give me a second chance?”

Rey stared down into a container of chicken and broccoli with more attentiveness than it was really due. “You seem like you know something I don’t,” she said finally, taking a heaping spoonful. “As if every word you say is supposed to mean more to me than it does.”

He started filling his own plate after she moved away from the counter, unsure of how to respond, then said, “When I left, I went to visit an old family friend.”

Rey settled into a chair at the table, waiting silently.

“Maz has always been able to see more than she should, if that makes sense.” He set his plate across from hers then went to the fridge, fetching two beers. “I called her a psychic once and she just shook her finger at me and said things were never quite that simple. I’m still not sure what she meant by that.”

“She knows about the house?” Rey guessed, taking the beer he offered. 

“The house, and you.” He sat down, taking in a breath. “I told her about the connection I felt, and she convinced me to come back and talk with you about it. Said it might be fate.”

Rey’s eyes widened slightly, but she didn’t immediately reply. Instead she sipped her beer, tapping her fingers absently on the surface of the table as she thought. 

“That would be a lovely story, wouldn’t it?” she said eventually, looking a little wistful. “Like a dark fairy tale.” She tilted her head a little to the side, watching him. “And how do you feel about it?”

“The same way I’ve felt ever since we met- like I’ve been off-center for years, and suddenly I’ve found my balance again.”

“It does feel a little like that,” she murmured, almost to herself. 

Rey began to eat, her expression that of someone working through a thorny problem. Taking the hint, he bent his attention to his own meal. 

After a few minutes she swallowed the last of an egg roll and spoke. “As I see it, we have two main issues.”

His mouth full, he nodded for her to continue. 

“The first is the house, which clearly scares the hell out of you.” She sat back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest. “And while I still don’t believe the house is haunted, I do believe that whatever happened fifteen years ago legitimately traumatized you.”

Rey paused, obviously waiting to see if he had a rebuttal. Instead he simply said- because even if she didn’t believe in the supernatural aspect, she was certainly correct about the trauma- “That’s a sound conclusion.”

“The second is our connection.” She paused again. “I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Rey admitted. “I’m… I’m worried about how it will end.”

“Maybe it doesn’t.”

A kind of weighty silence settled over the room as they regarded each other, eventually broken not by words but by the quiet clink of Rey’s fork against her plate.

“So,” she said after the silence had dissipated, “we slay the beast, and then we… what? Pick out a china pattern? Set up a nursery?” 

“I was thinking that I would introduce you to my cat first, but we could make a few stops on the way back to Manteo if you want,” he replied with a slow smile, and she laughed, looking pleasantly startled. “What are you doing this weekend?”

Rey picked up her fork again. “Watching tv, probably,” she replied with a shrug, spearing a piece of chicken. “You?”

“Same.” 

“Maybe we watch tv together, then,” she said casually. “Wander around town.”

He took a swig of his beer, hiding his grin. “Okay.”

“Okay.” She ate another bite, then added, “But I still won’t have sex with you.”

Ben smiled down at his nearly empty plate, feeling unreasonably fond of her for no good reason. “Okay.” A beat. “Sweetheart.”


	5. maze

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise mid-week post! I hope you enjoy!

It happened like this: Anakin grew weaker, and weaker, and weaker, and as each day passed Padmé saw the man her husband had been slip away just a little more. Sheev seemed to be the only person who could still tease out that spark of Anakin, and Padmé was too weary to feel anything but relief. 

She was tired- _so_ tired- and felt as weighed down by her belly as she might with pockets full of stones. The twins were already showing signs of being a rambunctious pair, and each kick drained her bit by bit until looking in the mirror was like looking at a ghost. 

Finally, her doctor put her on bed-rest.

“I can’t,” she protested, barely having enough energy to form the words. “My husband…”

“I know.” And Dr. Kenobi did seem to understand, and looked as if he took the situation more personally than he ought. “Mrs. Skywalker, if you don’t conserve your energy the odds of you surviving the birth are very slim.”

Padmé hesitated at that, putting the pieces together sluggishly. Her children, orphaned before they had barely drawn breath. She couldn’t, wouldn’t allow that to happen. 

_I’ll stay till the bitter end,_ Sheev had said when he had first arrived, and she thought _thank God, thank God, thank God._

\- - -

Rey woke in the early morning, befuddled by a wisp of dream that still felt quite real: walking down a hall, her belly bulging under her hands. Rolling over to her side she could still feel the ghost of that weight, and even lying down there was the sense that her center of gravity had shifted- and then it was gone, and her body was her own again.

“That’s a first,” she murmured to herself as she sat up. Apparently her off-the-cuff suggestion the night before about setting up a nursery had stuck in her brain. 

“He would make big babies,” Rey mused as she stared down at her stomach, surprisingly not put off by the idea. Ben, with his large hands and looming height and firmly muscled chest that she had only briefly felt through his shirt.

 _You’re not having sex with him,_ she reminded herself as she unwound herself from the sheets, then mentally amended _not yet, at least._

After all this was over, in her scheduled free time between jobs, then she might take him up on the offer to meet his cat and, presumably, spend a good amount of time in his bed. And maybe- maybe- this whole idea of fate might turn out to have a kind of truth to it.

They hadn’t made any firm plans the night before, but when Rey knocked on the connecting door a little after ten am Ben answered almost immediately, shirtless and rubbing a towel over his hair.

 _I was right about the muscle,_ she thought, then realized she was gaping and immediately shut her mouth. “Don’t you have a shirt or something?” she asked, cheeks blazing with heat. 

“A few,” he replied dryly, the hint of a smile on his face, and turned to leave the room. 

A part of Rey- one very interested part in this new twist- noted that the view from the back was almost as good as the one from the front. 

Another saw the large scar on his lower back, near his right side, and that was the part that won out. “When did you get that?”

Ben hesitated in the doorway, still facing away from her. “Fifteen years ago,” he answered quietly, and continued on, disappearing from view.

Rey raised a hand instinctively, taking hold of the door-frame.

 _You knew that whatever happened was bad,_ she reminded herself, feeling a surge of guilt. _How did you never consider that the scars might be physical as well as mental?_

She took in a deep breath and then stepped inside. Walking over to the couch, she sat heavily on its plump cushions.

When he reappeared a few minutes later, buttoning a blue plaid shirt, he considered her face carefully. “Don’t worry about it,” he said after a moment, his expression unexpectedly soft. “Want to head downtown? It’s grown since I was last here.”

“Sure,” she said, but stayed where she was.

He moved forward, holding out a hand. “Come on; let’s go be tourists.”

Rey slipped her hand into his and allowed him to pull her up. “You don’t need to work?”

“A day off might actually help.” He shrugged, grabbing his coat with his free hand. “Where’s your coat, sweetheart?”

She had to admit that the endearment was growing on her. “I’ll get it.”

They drove the few miles to downtown proper, and found they weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the clear day: more than a few couples roamed the sidewalks, strolling under the bright autumn sun. 

“Will you be leaving town for Halloween?” Rey asked as they walked down one of the larger streets, past artsy shops and small restaurants. 

“Thought about it,” he admitted. “But I have a reason to stay, now.”

She didn’t have to meet his gaze to know that he was talking about her. “We’ll finish work before dark,” she assured him, squeezing his hand. “And since you probably won’t be in the mood for horror movies, we’ll see what the Hallmark channel has on offer.”

“I like the way you think.” 

They wandered through the small folk art museum, ate lunch at a microbrewery, and then- for reasons Rey never would be able to remember- drove out of town to visit a nearby corn maze. 

“I’ve never done one of these,” she admitted as they entered, feeling an almost childlike excitement as they made their way down the first path, surrounded by towering corn. “You?”

“A few. My dad liked them.” Ben kept pace with her, his hands in his pockets. “He always got lost, though. His sense of direction was never as good as he liked to pretend.”

“Isn’t getting lost the point?”

“It loses its appeal after several hours,” he replied with a grin.

Impulsively she ran ahead, putting on a burst of speed when she heard him give chase. His legs were longer, but _she_ was faster, and when the path branched she darted right, then left, then left again. 

“You’re going to be in trouble when I catch you, sweetheart,” she heard him call, darkly amused in a way that tempted her to stop and linger. Being caught sounded like fun.

Winning whatever this impromptu game was, though, sounded even better.

When she finally stopped several minutes later, a little winded, Rey began to think that maybe she had made a mistake. She stood at the top of a branching corridor, and all she saw in every direction was an endless sea of green.

She pulled out her phone and opened the compass app. They had entered to the east, which meant that the exit was likely in the west, but…

“Ben?” she called, listening for the man-made rustle of stalks or his footfalls. All she heard was distant traffic from the main road. “Ben? Seriously, I’m ready to be found.”

She whirled at a sound behind her, but the relieved smile on her lips immediately disappeared when she saw nothing but corn.

An animal, likely, she decided as she double-checked her compass and took the westward path. Or a sudden breeze.

Rey continued on, calling for Ben occasionally and taking each westward path unless forced to double-back. After ten minutes she stopped and did what she should have done from the start: she called Ben’s phone.

The call went straight to voicemail. 

Oddly uneasy, Rey left a brief message and took the next turn. 

Twenty minutes after that, she left the path entirely and began pushing into the thickly planted corn, heading directly west. It wasn’t pleasant, squeezing her way through, but it was manageable, and soon enough she would reach another path.

When she didn’t, she did her best to ignore the tinge of panic even as each step grew harder, corn stalks seeming to catch her coat and snare her ankles, leaves brushing against her face like grasping hands. 

Abruptly she was forced to a stop, her upper body somehow jammed in the foliage. “Ridiculous,” Rey whispered, trying to tug herself free. She saw the sudden, unbidden image of her corpse caught in a thresher, long dead of dehydration or exposure, and redoubled her efforts. 

“You are getting so _dramatic_ ,” she snapped, irritated with herself. “You are-”

As quickly as she had been caught Rey tumbled free, landing hard on clear ground. With a groan she rolled onto her back, staring up at a sky that had shifted from pure blue to golden sunset.

“I need,” Rey said in a quiet, measured tone, shoving aside all thoughts of haunts and the fear that had taken root in her belly, “to see my doctor when this is all over.”

Because clearly- _clearly_ \- this was a medical matter. The alternative did not bear thinking of; Ben’s theories were rooted in whatever had caused that terrible scar and probably a period of low-level carbon monoxide poisoning. That was _logical._

Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and without sitting up Rey tugged it free and answered. “Hi,” she said on a sigh, watching as red crept into the golden sky.

Ben’s “ _Fuck_ ” in reply was spoken in perfect and absolute relief. 

“I got lost,” she told him, realizing she was weary to her bones. “I think I may still be?”

“I can see you,” he said briskly, the _now_ unspoken but implied. Given that she was alone on her path, he was probably on the tower that overlooked the maze. “You’re just two rights from the exit. Can you stand?”

“Yep.” Rey dragged herself to her feet, wincing. “Right, you said?”

Ben appeared just as she left the maze, clearly having sprinted to meet her. “You’re okay?” he asked, a little out of breath as he ran his hands lightly down her arms, dislodging bits of corn silk and leaves. His evident concern rocked her almost as much as the fall had. 

“I-”

She stopped, taking in a breath as she realized just how parched and hungry she was. “I lost track of time,” she finished, the phrase almost- almost- a question. 

He was staring down at her with an expression that no one had ever directed toward Rey before, and she had absolutely no idea what to do with the depth of emotion written clearly on his face: need and tender compassion and a kind of fierce warrior mien that seemed entirely out of place in their current surroundings.

“You were gone for four hours,” Ben said carefully, his hands curling over her shoulders. “You completely disappeared.”

Stunned, but unable to dispute his assertion, she checked her phone. 

Ten missed calls. Twenty texts. Three voice-mails.

Rey licked her lips, longing for water and her formerly boring life. Finally, she lifted her head and asked, “Hungry?”

The frustrated half-glare she received in return made her feel almost normal. 

\- - -

Ben shepherded Rey through the lobby to the elevator, a bag of food from a random drive-through dangling from one hand. She had a slight frown on her face every time he glanced down at her, her gaze distant, but she didn’t say a word until the door to his suite had closed behind them. She had been that way for practically the entire trip back to the hotel, save for the moment when he had handed her a bottle of water and she had slammed it back like his college self had funneled beer. 

“I’m going to take a shower,” Rey said before he could say anything. Almost mechanically she shrugged off her outerwear and let it drop to the floor, walking away as if the article of clothing had never existed in the first place. She left the connecting door open behind her, but he didn’t think it was in invitation. 

After placing the food on the table Ben retrieved her coat, plucking bits of detritus from the fabric as he waited. 

Whatever had happened in that maze- and _something_ had happened, something more than a bad sense of direction- it had clearly been the fault of the house. 

_It shouldn’t be so strong,_ he thought, removing another piece of fiber. _We were, what, ten miles away? Maybe more._

Ben glanced toward the open door at the muffled sound of a shower, clenching his fingers around the cloth, and then let out a quietly despairing groan. 

“She doesn’t believe, and you can’t force her to,” he muttered to himself. “It took you far too long to believe and you _lived_ there.”

He was still removing bits of plant matter with almost obsessive attentiveness when she entered nearly ten minutes later, dressed in fleece pajamas and thick socks. “You don’t have to do that,” she said, sitting at the table.

Ben put her coat aside and stood. “I like being useful.” He looked her over quickly, taking in the down-turned corners of her mouth and the seemingly new shadows under her eyes. “How are you, sweetheart?”

Rey almost smiled at that. “I’m not your sweetheart,” she replied, beginning to unpack the bag of food. 

He tried not to feel that they had lost ground with that reply. “I think you’d enjoy it,” he teased gently instead, moving to stand beside her. She closed her eyes when he ran his fingers through her damp hair, loosening her grip on the box of fried chicken to lean into him. 

“Too much, probably,” she admitted, one corner of her mouth quirking further upward. “Could we leave the door open tonight?” 

“Yes.” Ben bent down, pressing a kiss to the uneven part of her hair. “Eat.”

She ate with the concentration of someone who had just survived a grueling hike without provisions, and- having no real idea what she had experienced in that maze- Ben supposed the comparison might not be too far off. 

“You can tell me what happened,” he said after finishing his own meal. “I’ll believe you.”

Rey held a half-eaten drumstick with sudden wariness, averting her gaze away from him. “I got lost,” she said again, that same faint uncertainty in her voice as before, and he let the subject lie.

After, when they were on the couch and she was flipping through the channels with the concentration of someone avoiding a greater problem, he tugged her onto his lap, draping the spare blanket from the closet over the pair of them. Her body settled against his with the familiarity of a long-term lover, and he found himself thinking once more of fate and dreams and his bed in Manteo no longer half-empty. 

“I like that shirt on you,” was Rey’s only comment on the maneuver, relaxing into him. 

Ben curled an arm around her waist under the blanket, barely noticing when she stopped on an old musical. “Let me take you home,” he murmured in her ear. “Please, Rey.”

She didn’t stiffen or pull away; instead she curled closer, yawning. “I have a job to do,” she said, still looking toward Gene Kelly twirling around a lamp-post. “I never leave until the job’s done.”

In any other situation he would appreciate that kind of dedication. 

“I’m going to stay in tomorrow,” Rey continued sleepily. “Read your book.”

“Okay.” 

He might lose her, he realized for not the first time. To a fall or a fire or some freak drowning- something inexplicable that only the house could devise. And what would he do, after that?

Ben was a little startled to find that he wasn’t quite sure.

\- - -

_“Tell me,” Ben murmured, propped up on one elbow next to her._

_Rey rolled over onto her stomach, her bare body obscured by the sheets. “I lost time,” she admitted, her voice filled with fear she had managed to hide while awake. “Again. And the corn…”_

_“Tell me, sweetheart,” he encouraged when her voice trailed off._

_“The corn trapped me,” she said in a whisper. “I think… I think I could have died there.”_

_And maybe the house had considered that path, he thought, brushing strands of hair away from her face. “But you didn’t.”_

_“I would have starved,” she continued, almost as if he hadn’t spoken. “Like...”_

_Ben settled a hand on her back. They both carried heavy, painful secrets, letting slip only bits and pieces at a time, and he knew that she had no idea that their dreams were shared. She had already told him too much; better she told him the rest awake and consenting. “Shh.”_

_Rey closed her eyes with a tired sigh. “Am I still in the corn?” she asked in a mumble, and he immediately wrapped himself around her._

_“No.” He pressed a kiss against her hair, her body temptingly warm against his. “The corn didn’t stand a chance against you, stubborn girl.”_

_She huffed a slight laugh, the sound barely audible. “Ben.”_

_“Hmm?”_

_“What a good dream you are.”_

\- - -

Rey spent Sunday stretched out on Ben’s couch with his book in her hands, reading voraciously as he typed away at his makeshift desk.

“There aren’t a lot of virgin heroes,” she commented once she reached the first sex scene, regretting the words when he turned to look at her. 

“You don’t like them?” he asked, looking as if he made the query more from professional curiosity than anything else. 

“No, I do,” Rey admitted, hoping her blush wasn’t _too_ apparent. She should have slipped out of the room instead of opening her mouth, because it was surprisingly difficult to read a well-written love scene with the object of her current desire less than ten feet away. “It’s… it’s a different power dynamic in a Regency, isn’t it? Instead of the experienced hero deflowering the virgin heroine.”

Ben seemed to consider those words for a long moment. “It is,” he said finally. “I’ve written my share of rakes- I’m writing one right now, actually- but I prefer for my couples to be on as equal a standing as possible.”

“I enjoy that about your books.” Rey tugged the blanket over her a little farther up, her blush still feeling very present. “Love, actually.”

He turned back to his laptop with a small smile on his face. “Good.”

The day slipped by too quickly, and Monday followed far more bitterly than usual at Sunday’s heels. 

“Good weekend?” Poe asked cheerfully when they met on the front lawn of the house, looking impervious to the gloomy mist that hung in the air.

Rey stared up at the edifice in front of them, questions and muddled belief warring in her mind. “Yes,” she replied a second too late, avoiding her coworkers’ curious gazes. “Remember,” Rey continued, forcing a bright smile, “we leave before dark.”

And with the barest hints of corn silk still clinging to her coat, she strode inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before anyone asks, Ben isn't a virgin in this fic; I just liked the idea of him tackling one of those rare Regencies with a virgin hero.


	6. what lies hidden

It happened like this: Padmé settled into her prescribed bed-rest with ill-grace, feeling all the more guilty at how _relieved_ she secretly was to be off her feet and out of the master bedroom. Anakin slept so restlessly- mind and flailing limbs alike- that she had weeks beforehand asked Sheev to move a twin bed into the room for her, and on hearing the doctor’s orders he had immediately insisted on switching places with her entirely. 

“You can’t spend the next few months cooped up in the corner of that bedroom,” Sheev had said. “Mine has a tv and a lovely view, and it’s certainly quieter.” He offered her an empathetic smile, one free of judgment. “I know Anakin’s been having some very loud nightmares.”

Nightmares that inevitably terrified Padmé out of her own sleep. He never seemed to remember his dreams once awake- her husband’s memory continued to crumble, bit by bit and day by day- but she knew the basics: flames and lava and the rage of betrayal.

“You won’t be getting much sleep,” she had warned Sheev, and he had shrugged. 

“Better me than you.”

That first night alone was the best stretch of sleep she had had in weeks, and if Anakin screamed in the wee hours of the night, she never heard. 

“Listen,” Sheev said seriously a few days later, visiting with her while she ate her supper, “would you mind if I brought in some help?”

Padmé was briefly surprised by the request, but understanding came quickly. “Of _course,_ ” she replied, feeling new guilt at the weight she had piled on his shoulders. “We can afford… we can afford someone to cook and clean, at least,” she continued, considering their strapped finances. 

Or _her_ strapped finances, rather. Anakin was past the point of caring about money.

“Don’t worry about that.” He leaned forward in his seat, elbows on his knees. “I have a few friends who are considering a move, and they’d like to get a feel for the area. I’ve explained the situation and they’re willing to help out, for room and board.”

Padmé couldn’t help but think there was something off about the idea.

 _You have the room._ she thought, and considered Sheev’s weary bearing. _He needs the help._

But something… something like a warning sounded in her mind.

Feeling a little fuzzy, she pushed the pulse of unease aside. “Of course,” she said again. “Of course.”

\- - -

The connecting door stayed open even after Rey left for work, and just the sight of it made Ben feel a little steadier. 

The slight uptick in his mood, however, barely registered.

He had to tell her. He had to tell her _exactly_ what had happened fifteen years before, even if the idea of reliving those memories felt like walking directly along a precipice. Too many nightmares, too many panic attacks made that part of his past dangerous territory to tread even after years of therapy.

Needing a friendly ear- one that would believe him without question- he called his cousin.

“Huh,” was Ruwee’s first response after he explained the events of the past few days, her voice contemplative. He allowed her time to think, biting his bottom lip impatiently. 

“Well,” she said finally, “I’m not entirely surprised.”

“Why?”

“This is its last stand.” Bebe mewed faintly on the other end of the line. “I think the house senses your intentions- probably remembers just how stubborn you are. It’s going to throw everything it has at you.”

A disquieting but entirely likely scenario. “Fuck,” he muttered, standing from his chair to pace. 

“I agree that you should tell her, though.”

“Putting it into words is… difficult,” Ben replied, hating the way his voice cracked a little as he spoke. 

“I know.”

“It still feels so real,” he continued, thumping a fist against the wall before turning to retrace his route. “Like it just happened.”

“I know, I know.” A brief moment of silence, and then: “Ben.”

The way she said his name made him stop halfway across the carpet. There was unease, there, and a kind of sorrow. “What?”

“You know… you know that the house will use her as bait, right?”

Hearing the words aloud- words he had barely dared to consider even in his most private thoughts- was akin to being doused with ice-cold water. “I know,” he echoed quietly.

Because he did know, even if he had avoided this moment of reckoning for the past week. 

How odd and impossible it seemed that he had only known Rey for a _week._

“You’re going to have to make a choice,” Ruwee continued in a carefully modulated voice. “You’ll be forced to.”

“I know,” he said again, looking around the almost overwhelmingly beige hotel room and longing desperately for his safe, small house. “Cuddle Bebe for me?”

A pause. “Of course.” There was a pained note in her voice, and he knew that Ruwee understood his unspoken question. 

Ben couldn’t face the possible end of his own life, after all, without knowing that his cat would be provided for.

God, he missed that fluffy beast.

\- - -

“How was your trip?”

Rose looked up from the glass doorknob she was removing, her smile just a shade dimmer than usual. “Good! It was nice- really nice- to get out of town.” 

That much Rey believed, but the shadow on Rose’s face gave her pause. “Good.” 

Rose appeared momentarily conflicted, then said, “I dreamed of Paige.” She set down her screwdriver and laughed a little, though the sound was self-conscious and humorless. “I haven’t dreamed of her in months.”

Rey leaned back against the wall, feeling a sudden chill. “Nightmare?” 

“Not really.” Rose took in a breath, reaching up to touch the spot under her shirt where Rey knew a locket rested. “We’re sitting at our grandmother’s kitchen table, drinking tea, and I can _tell_ she’s worried but I don’t know _why._ She keeps talking, but the room is utterly silent.”

“Have you told Finn and Poe?”

Rose shook her head _no_. “They’re both… unsettled, I think.” 

Not knowing quite why, Rey glanced almost unwillingly down the hall. The entry to the master bedroom was tinged faintly red, as it ever was. “Maybe…”

She licked her lips, uncertain, then called herself a coward and turned back to Rose. “Dinner tonight?” she asked instead. “Drinks on me.”

Before Rose could answer there was a loud _crack_ from two rooms down.

“ _Shit,_ ” Finn said with wholehearted fervor, and as they scrambled to join him he added, “Unhurt; I just ruined this piece of hardwood.”

Rey knelt next to him, frowning at the partially torn-up carpet and the broken flooring underneath. The piece of wood in question looked, at first glance, like it had been broken- though _how_ , Rey had no clue, unless an unknown termite infestation had weakened the wood- but then she noticed the neat edges on all sides. 

“I don’t think you did this,” she said, picking up the short plank. “Wasn’t that corner of the carpet already loose?”

“Yeah.” Finn, who looked a little rattled, had Rose’s hand clasped firmly in his. “Seemed like it would be a cinch to remove, and then… it’s like it got caught, or something.”

That made little sense, but this project in general was undeniably topsy-turvy. Without questioning him she placed the board aside, then pulled out her flashlight to check the state of the sub-flooring through the hole. 

What she could see looked perfectly stable. As the beam of light swept each corner, she caught a glimpse of something tucked just under the adjoining boards. Her heart skipped a beat as she reached into the hole, drawing out a small, dusty book. 

“I think you found some kid’s hiding place,” Rey said in as light a tone as possible, some instinctive part of her chanting _no no no_. “Maybe the board swelled, or something.”

Rose and Finn looked at her, then looked at the book, and- slowly- nodded. “What’s in it?” Finn prompted, though he sounded wary.

Rey opened the book halfway through, finding handwriting that looked distinctly like it was written by an adult in a rush. “A diary,” she said, and her eyes caught on one line.

_Leia refuses to believe that her son is gone; she’s completely fooled by whatever inhabits Ben._

“Rey?”

She snapped the book closed, thinking quickly. Technically the book was their property, according to the contract.

Still. 

“The client needs to see this,” she said firmly.

To her relief, neither argued. 

\- - - 

Rey returned shortly after the fall of night, her entrance heralded by the quiet click of a door closing and the thump of her bag to the ground. 

“Ben?”

“In here.” He saved his work as her footsteps came closer, turning in his chair just as she appeared in the doorway. She looked unharmed, though worryingly pale. “What happened?” he asked, rising and crossing the room. 

“We found this under the floorboards of a guest room.” She held out a small book between them, unexpected sympathy in her eyes. “I think it belonged to someone in your family.”

His immediate thought was _Grandfather._ That would make sense; surely only a man gradually growing deranged because of an inoperable brain tumor would hide a diary in such a place. Steeling himself, he accepted the small volume, holding it spine down and letting it fall open where it would. 

_Han spent half the day up in the attic, complaining about the squirrels nesting in the eaves,_ he read, recognizing with a sinking heart his uncle’s fine penmanship. Skipping forward, he continued to read snatches as the letters grew sloppier and sloppier, ink smeared in the margins. 

_…the darkness has weight, here…_

_…but his eyes, the way he smirks…_

_…my nephew is gone._

Ben made his way to the couch on shaking legs, sitting down heavily, and turned to the last entry. 

_Only the demon remains, whispering dark plans neither Leia nor Han can hear. The creature skulks from room to room, watching me. I’m its adversary now, the only one who can save us all._

“Well,” he said numbly, “I was planning to tell you tonight anyway.” He let the book fall onto the coffee table, staring at the seemingly innocuous object. “Did you read it?”

“No.” She perched on the edge of the couch, angled toward him. “I opened it; saw your name. That’s all.”

Ben nodded, his gaze still on the book. “My uncle wrote that.” He could taste the metallic beginnings of panic in his mouth. “The month we were here, he… he gradually grew convinced that something was wrong with me.” 

She didn’t prod when the silence stretched too long, and he was grateful for it. 

“He thought I was possessed,” he admitted in a whisper, and from the corner of his eye he could see the way her smallest movements stilled. “He thought I intended to kill them all. It took me too long to understand; I was just some _kid_ watching my parent’s marriage fall apart in front of my eyes, and whenever I tried to discuss it with my uncle it was as if we spoke completely different languages.”

She moved a little closer, her hand coming to rest on his knee. Ben was able to look away from the book, then, his attention shifting to where they were connected. “We left the house because my uncle tried to kill me.” He touched the back of her hand, speaking slowly. “I was woken up by something- a creak from the floorboards, maybe- and saw him standing over me, a kitchen knife in his hand. I’ve never forgotten it… the way he was framed by the light from the hallway, the way the light glinted off the knife.” He took in a breath, his own voice sounding distant. “We fought. He stabbed me in the side.”

Rey didn’t say a single word, but she did turn her hand over, fingers interlocking with his. Ben studied the juxtaposition of their clasped hands, reliving flashes of the recklessly fast drive to the hospital. His blood had permanently stained the upholstery of his father’s beloved Falcon, resistant to every method of cleaning his parents had tried. 

“After he got out of jail he disappeared,” Ben finished quietly. “I never saw my uncle again.”

And in a way he had never seen his mother again; the woman she had been before the house replaced by someone who always seemed to watch him with a kind of loss. His father had been little better, Han’s absences growing longer and more frequent until a fatal heart attack had ended his wandering.

Rey settled her other hand on his back. He almost didn’t hear her quiet, “Oh, Ben.”

He couldn’t blame her for not knowing what to say; he barely had words himself. It was enough that when he turned toward her, the beginnings of tears dripping down his cheeks, she wrapped her arms around him without a second of hesitation. 

\- - -

_Not a surprise, Rey supposed, that she would dream of Ben again- especially this sad-eyed Ben in front of her, who caressed the fingers of her left hand as if she were precious._

_“I like how you touch me,” she admitted, lifting her free hand to brush her fingertips over his mouth. She had wanted to touch him like this after his story- a story that had made her heart hurt in a way that lingered, a story that had made every possible response feel empty and useless- but the impulse had seemed selfish. “No one ever touches me, not really.” She swept a glancing stroke down the bridge of his nose, then along the left side of his jaw. “I think you’ve touched me more in a week than I’ve been touched in… in a while.”_

_The remnants of sorrow shifted from his expression, replaced with a frown. He folded himself around her, his breath ruffling her hair. “No one cuddles you, sweetheart?”_

_“Not like this.” She snuggled into him, unashamedly enjoying the feel of being ensconced in his hold. In dreams, at least, she could be selfish in a way she wouldn’t dare in real life. “I used to date, but I’m too clingy.”_

_“Explain,” he said quietly, the words rumbling under the ear pressed to his chest._

_“I expect too much. Everyone says so.”_

_“What does that mean?”_

_Kind of her, to dream him shirtless. Under her cheek his skin was surprisingly soft. “I like knowing,” she replied, closing her eyes. “I like knowing where I am in a relationship. I’m not… I’m not good at casual.”_

_“Maybe you date the wrong people.” His hand cupped the back of her head, a warm and welcome weight. “You still don’t believe me, do you? About the house?”_

_In this safe space she actually allowed herself to consider it._

_“I don’t know,” she said finally, lifting her head, and it was the truth._

_She watched as he seemed to consider her answer. An odd dream, she thought, and then he spoke._

_“I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to remember it.”_

_Faint dread seemed to wash through her. “Why?”_

_“Because when you wake up, I want you to come find me immediately.”_

_“Why?” she asked again, the sense of dread growing stronger._

_“Promise.”_

_Not an order- a request, and one made with the return of that same sad-eyed expression. “I promise,” Rey replied, not without reluctance._

_“You commented on my virgin hero.” The hand cupping the back of her head drew her down again gently, encouraging her to rest against him. “I was a virgin when I started that book.”_

_Rey blinked, thrown by the change of topic and the way his fingers were massaging her scalp. “What?”_

_“Wake up,” he said. “Wake up and come ask me about Bazine.”_

_“What-”_

\- - -

It was still dark when she woke, heart racing, and she spent a long moment staring up at a ceiling lost in shadow. 

_Come find me immediately._

Just a dream.

Nonetheless, Rey sat up.

 _You are a callous fool,_ she scolded herself as she crept into Ben’s suite. _Leave him alone,_ she thought as she padded into his bedroom, expecting him to snap at her at any moment for intruding.

Instead: “Bazine,” he said sleepily, and she heard him pat the mattress next to him. “I promised to tell you about Bazine.”

Rey staggered forward a step, her legs rapping against the bed-frame in the dark. “Not possible,” she muttered to herself, breaking out in a sweat. 

“We’re sharing dreams.” Ben sounded patient if drowsy. “Come to bed, sweetheart.”

Too overwhelmed to retreat, she dropped onto the mattress next to him. “Oh, God.”

“The motherfucking house, not God,” he corrected sleepily. “Lie down.”

With a little bit of effort she was under the covers, breathing too quickly and sheltered under his arm. _This is wrong,_ she thought, off-kilter. _You should be comforting him, still, not the other way around._

“I had to pick something specific,” he explained, his hand returning to its place at the back of her head. “Nothing that could be explained away. But you don’t have to hear about Bazine, if you don’t want to. We could go back to sleep.”

The last thing Rey wanted was to go back to sleep, not while she was so unsettled. “Is it a bad story?”

No more bad stories, not for Ben. She wouldn’t allow it.

“No.” 

“Tell me, then,” she said, needing a locus for her attention.

“Simple, really,” he murmured, his voice so calm in comparison to several hours before. “I just never had sex. Trust issues, probably- it was easier to fantasize than allow myself to be vulnerable with anyone else.”

Rey moved a little closer, trying to force her breathing into a regular pattern. “What changed?”

“A good therapist. Around the time I started writing that book, Bazine and I decided to try dating. She was- is- a good friend, a trusted one.” He was absently petting her hair, slipping strands through his fingers. “It only lasted about a month, but during that time we ended up in bed together. The break-up was mutual and amicable.”

Each pass of his hand should have soothed- normally would, a part of her suspected- but her mind kept skipping from the dream to the revelation about his uncle to his mundane words at that very moment. “We’re not good friends,” she said randomly, and his reply sounded a little amused. 

“Not yet.”

The question spilled out of her before she knew it. “But you’re comfortable with the idea of having sex with me?”

His arm tightened around her, and when he spoke again it was a soft murmur directly in her ear. “I want to map every inch of you.”

The spike of arousal she felt at those words almost took her breath away.

“Go to sleep, sweetheart,” he said as she struggled to regain any sense of equilibrium, his voice sleepy again.

“ _No_ ,” Rey replied fervently, practically tearing herself from his grip to sit up.

After a moment the lamp on his side of the bed came on. Ben blinked at her, pushing disheveled hair away from his face. “Rey?”

“We’ve shared _dreams,_ ” she said slowly, returning to the main point. If they had shared dreams- an impossibility- then everything he had said was true. If everything he had said was true, then-

“Do you believe me now?” he asked quietly, unknowingly interrupting her thoughts. 

Rey lay back down again, grabbing the comforter out of a need to do something, anything, with her hands. “Ben, this is my _job._ ”

“I know.” Ben turned onto his side, propped up on one elbow. “I shouldn’t have sold the salvage rights in the first place. I’m sorry.” He placed his free hand on the blanket just above her stomach, almost cautiously. “Never would have met you, though,” he added softly. “The one bright spot in the dark.”

Rey forced herself to breathe slowly and consider. There was no _protocol_ for anything like this. For utterly unstable structures, yes. For ancient evils, no. “I don’t have the authority to send the others home,” she said finally, still keeping a white-knuckled grasp on the blanket. “Would they be any safer with me gone?”

He hesitated, then answered with clear reluctance. “Doubtful.” 

“Right.” She half-rolled out of bed, a shiver running down her spine when her feet hit the floor. “What am I going to do?” Rey asked herself in a whisper, moving just far enough away to press her back to the wall. “What am I going to _do?_ ”

“Talk to your boss,” Ben said immediately, following her. He stopped at the midpoint, extending a hand. “I’ll talk to your boss, too.”

“She’ll just remove me from the project and send someone else to help the others finish.” Rey froze, considering. “Did I tell you… in another dream…”

“About being homeless?” Ben took another step closer, then another, his extended hand cupping her cheek. “Sweetheart, you never have to worry about that again.”

And it felt like the most natural thing in the world to believe him. Rey could see just how it would go, in that moment: her own small salvage operation on the coast, a ring on her left hand, a family she would help create instead of intrude on.

“You’re not alone,” Ben murmured, his expression open and completely unguarded.

Releasing a ragged breath, she leaned a little into his palm. “Neither are you.”

And then she allowed him to tuck her back into his bed, where he stroked her hair until she finally fell asleep.


	7. hearts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all!
> 
> The lovely nancylovesreylo made a wonderful moodboard for this fic that you can marvel over [here](https://nancylovesreylo.tumblr.com/post/178092508959/this-story-features-the-scariest-haunted-house). It even includes a cover for the ARC Ben gives Rey of his latest book, _The Lord of Silent Hall_!

It happened like this: Sheev’s friends- one man, two women- seemed pleasant enough, what little Padmé saw of them. They introduced themselves on arrival, and made friendly small talk when they passed the door of her room, but by and large they were quiet and unobtrusive house-guests. The quality of the cooking did go up, she noticed, and Sheev looked almost well-rested, and at first she was pleased with how everything had worked out.

Her husband, though, grew even more unsettled. He took to roaming the halls at odd hours, face prematurely aged by pain that his medication couldn’t touch. 

_Quality of life,_ Padmé silently scoffed whenever she saw him, quiet anger burning as she remembered his doctor’s condescending words. Anakin had anything but.

He still paused in his roaming to visit her everyday. Memories might fade, personality dim, but the tumor couldn’t seem to erase Padmé herself from Anakin’s mind. 

“Send them away, angel,” he begged one afternoon, his voice a ragged whisper. Under her hand his skin burned with a low, persistent fever. “They don’t belong here.”

Their guests were disrupting what little certainty he had, she realized with palpable guilt. “We need them,” she replied apologetically, forcing back tears as her hormones conspired against her. 

“I only need _you_ ,” Anakin insisted, grabbing her wrist with bruising force and pressing his cracked lips against her knuckles. “You can take care of me; you always take care of everyone.”

And maybe that was true, but the words made Padmé ache inside. The Anakin she had married would have spent her entire pregnancy cosseting her, trying his level best to anticipate every need she might have. If the doctor had ordered bed-rest in that far superior time-line, Anakin would have waited on her hand and foot, gently teasing her into good humor. 

Here, though- at this time, at this place- Anakin seemed utterly blind to her condition, and she could hardly be angry with him for it. “I can’t,” she said in a whisper, heart breaking at the look of betrayal on his face.

 _Hearts,_ she thought as Anakin buried his face in a spare pillow, their children kicking inside her. Padmé rubbed her belly, catching another kick against her palm. _Two hearts, right there._

And by God, no matter how much her own heart broke, she would safeguard theirs. 

\- - -

Ben was pulled from sleep by the faint sound of Rey’s alarm, the insistent beeping just loud enough through the wall to rouse him. Eyes still closed, he slid a hand over the cool, rumpled sheets at his side. Empty, which was a disappointment but not a surprise.

The beeping abruptly stopped, and with the knowledge that Rey was at least nearby he dragged himself out of bed and to the bathroom. 

When he crossed the threshold of her suite a few minutes later, he found her sitting at the table, a cup of coffee near her elbow and a paper towel covered in crumbled bits of pop-tart in front of her. 

“I don’t understand this certainty,” she said in lieu of good morning, stirring the pastry crumbs with one finger. “The certainty of us, I mean.”

“How so?” he asked as he settled into the chair across from her, glancing only briefly at the half-full pot of coffee on the counter.

“It’s just…”

Rey paused, lifting her hand from the mess that had been- might still be?- her breakfast. “My parents abandoned me in a junkyard,” she said in a flat voice that he could tell hid a deep well of emotion. “I was passed from family to family until I reached my majority. I’ve tiptoed through every relationship in my life in absolute fear of being left behind… and yet I look at you, and I see wedding rings and baby blankets.”

“I pay my exorbitant house insurance with love at first sight,” he said carefully, resisting the urge to show her just how much he liked the idea of wedding rings and baby blankets. “Risk of floods, you know.”

Her brow creased lightly, hinting at… something. Befuddlement, maybe, or concern. “This would be difficult enough on its own,” she grumbled after a moment. “We still have to deal with… that.”

She waved her hand in the general direction of the house. “I… I’m honestly still grappling with that aspect,” Rey continued, and under the table her toes bumped against his ankle. Maybe deliberately, maybe not, but either way her socked foot settled side by side with his. “I almost called my boss at five am; only impropriety stopped me.”

It was just past six, and she had finally fallen asleep near three. At most she had slept two hours before slipping out of his bed. “You really think she’ll fire you?”

Rey bit her bottom lip, casting her gaze toward the curtained window. “No,” she said slowly. “I’m not sure what she’ll do… but I don’t think she’ll believe the place is haunted. She’s very practical.”

“I could call my attorney.”

Phasma probably wouldn’t be surprised if he did, though she would likely argue that she didn’t specialize in contract law and what did he expect her to do, exactly? 

“Did you read the contract?” Rey asked with a slight, humorless grin. “The penalties for breaking it are steep.”

Very steep, if he recalled correctly, but maybe _The Lord of Silent Hall_ would sell exceptionally well. “I’ll keep you fed no matter what, sweetheart,” he promised, and judging by her expression he suspected that she appreciated that vow more than she might many others. “And warm.”

Sex with Bazine had been enjoyable, but he had never felt real hunger for her. Rey, though- she called to him in every way possible. Keeping her warm all winter would be a pleasure. 

A pink flush stole over her cheeks, her thoughts clearly following a similar path. “I can’t leave my crew,” she said, pressing her foot closer to his. “Unless Holdo gives me permission to abandon the project entirely, I have to finish.”

“I don’t think the house will let you finish.” Ben took in a breath. “It _won’t_ let you. Something will happen, and soon.”

Rey looked disgruntled as she sipped her coffee. “I’m just a pawn in this, aren’t I?” She settled the mug back on the table with obvious restraint. “You think the house is looking for a way to lure you inside, because you’re the one that got away. I’m collateral damage.”

Ben did not want to use the word ‘bait’, no matter if it was applicable. “That’s not how I see you.”

“I know that,” she grumbled. “You’ve already mentally slotted me in the… the right side of your bed? Left? Which side do you sleep on?”

“Left,” he admitted. 

Rey looked mildly disappointed, as if she had been hoping for a distracting fight over who would sleep where. “Well, that works out, then.” She looked down at her pastry crumbs. “We could have sex right now.”

Startled, he briefly lost his capacity for speech. “I thought you weren’t having sex with me,” he finally replied, his body informing him that sex was an _excellent_ idea.

“We both know that I was lying.” She pulled her sweatshirt over her head, revealing a camisole that did very little to hide her charms. “And quite frankly, Ben, if I’m about to be used as a disposable chess piece by a malevolent house I would at least like to be with you, first.” 

He still felt dazed, and whether it was because he was short on sleep or being propositioned at a very early hour he couldn’t quite tell. “Your logic is sound,” he managed after a moment, mouth dry as he gave in to the urge to stare at the way her nipples pressed against the thin gray fabric. “And I would love to oblige-”

 _Oblige,_ a part of his mind sneered. _Smooth._

“-but I can’t.”

Unexpected shame appeared on her face. “Of course,” she said hurriedly, crossing her arms over her chest. “That did sound like a demand, didn’t it? My apologies.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” he insisted, standing and moving quickly to her side of the table. “I _really_ want to-”

“I see that,” she interrupted, looking directly at the evidence tenting the front of his sweatpants.

“-but Maz said something else.” Ben paused, running a hand through his hair. “She suggested that the house might try to get you pregnant,” he explained slowly, each word sounding more and more ludicrous as they dropped from his mouth. 

Rey narrowed her eyes, her expression otherwise inscrutable. “The house… would try to get me _pregnant._ ”

He waited for her to continue, almost positive she would raise her voice to do so, and was surprised when she sighed. “Sure,” she said, slumping back in her seat. “That makes as much sense as the rest of this situation.”

When he placed his hands on her shoulders, fingers curling over warm, soft skin, she tilted her head back to look up at him. “Get dressed, sweetheart,” he said quietly. “Let’s get some actual food into you, and then call your boss.”

And- holding his gaze- she nodded. 

\- - -

“Say that again, but slowly,” Holdo said from the other end of the line, her voice patient despite the early hour.

Rey took in a breath, regretting the large stack of pancakes she had eaten as her stomach churned with nerves. Ben sat beside her, one hand curved over her denim-clad thigh. “The house is haunted.”

The silence stretched out far too long, leaving Rey on the verge of true nausea by the time her boss answered. “It’s been a while since you had a break, isn’t it?” Holdo said in a kind but impersonal fashion, the question almost rhetorical. “I don’t think you’ve taken more than a few days at a stretch for the past two years.”

True enough, but Rey had never known anything different. Even those short breaks had initially taken a certain amount of teeth-gritting, her instincts at odds with the idea that she could allow herself a period of rest. “This isn’t exhaustion,” she replied, careful to keep her voice even. “There is something _very_ wrong with that house, and it isn’t anything normal.”

Holdo sighed. “Listen, Rey.”

She _definitely_ regretted the pancakes, now. 

“I know you’re spending time outside of work with the client, and I know that you removed something from the house and gave it to him.” 

Censure, there, and though it was mild Rey couldn’t help but feel that she was only sensing the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. Holdo continued before Rey could formulate an answer. “So perhaps you’ve been swayed by some wild stories and a pair of pretty eyes, or- maybe- you’re colluding with a client who’s realized that he undersold the rights.”

“ _No,_ ” Rey said firmly. 

“It does seem unlikely,” Holdo agreed, speaking almost on top of her. “Given how level-headed and trustworthy you’ve always been. Still, I’m more inclined to believe either of those options over _ghosts_.” Her tone turned wry. “In this business so-called haunted houses are always code for some other problem. The last time someone tried to convince me a site was haunted it turned out there was a gas leak.”

“This isn’t a gas leak,” Rey insisted. “This isn’t the client trying to get more money. This is some kind of entity that legitimately means harm to me and mine; I need to get my crew out.”

Holdo said something almost unintelligible on the other end of the line, something that might have been Rey’s own name on the tail-end of a disappointed sigh.

Rey pressed her free hand to her forehead, where the beginnings of a headache rested. _Useless girl,_ she could hear a former foster father say. _Good for absolutely nothing._

“Snap will relieve you next week.” She heard the shuffle of papers on the other end of the line. “Your crew will get along fine without you.”

Rey took in a deep breath, a lump forming in her throat. “As you say,” she managed, and that was that.

She dropped her phone onto her lap after the call had ended, Ben mercifully silent beside her. “Another crew leader will take over on Monday,” she informed him with brittle composure. “So.”

“So.” He was pale- paler than usual- worry and guilt evident on his face. “So you’ll be working this week.”

“Yes, I will.” The urge to cry was almost overwhelming, but she fought it back. “Would you let me stay with you after Monday?” she asked, crossing her arms tightly over her chest in a bid to contain herself. “I can’t abandon my crew, and Resistance will stop paying for my room after Snap arrives.” Rey shook her head, curling her fingers tightly around her arms. “Won’t be allowed on site, either,” she continued in a mutter. 

_Useless,_ she heard again.

The center console of the car prevented him from moving closer, but Rey- knowing a solid hug would shatter her hard-won facade of calm- was grateful for the obstacle.

“Of course you can stay with me,” he was saying as she pressed bruises into her own upper arms. “Rey-”

“Could you take me back to the hotel?” Rey asked, interrupting him with her gaze on the rain-speckled windshield. “I need to leave for the site soon.”

Ben was silent for a moment, then said, “Of course.”

“And I don’t think you should come anywhere near the house again,” she added as he turned the key in the ignition. “If it really does want you so badly, no need to taunt it.”

“Trying to protect me, sweetheart?” he asked quietly, and she resisted the urge to reach over the barrier between them and run her fingers through his hair. 

“Maybe,” she answered. 

Maybe she had been swayed by Ben’s pretty eyes, as Holdo had said. Pretty eyes and shared dreams and the creeping dark that infested the house. 

“You’ll tell me, won’t you?” Rey said after he had made a right turn onto the road from the parking lot. “If I start acting strange?”

“If you start acting strange I’ll toss you into my trunk and leave town,” he answered immediately, surprising her into a laugh. 

“Duly warned,” she said with a small smile, feeling a little better for some obscure reason. “Pity I can’t do the same with you; I’ll have to settle for giving you a knock on the head and then tying you to the bedposts.”

“Don’t tempt me.” 

The rain picked up as they drew closer to the hotel, until it drummed heavily on the roof of his car. He parked in the space directly to the left of her truck, and when she reached for the door handle he turned toward her with an almost pleading expression. “Send me updates.”

It was the closest thing to an order he had ever given her, but the hints of raw panic on his face soothed her instinctive ire. “I’ll text you,” she promised, hitting the button on her key-fob to unlock her truck. The lights briefly flashed through the rain. 

He continued speaking, his voice low and fervent. “Nothing has ever made me feel as helpless as this house.” Ben leaned over the console, his hand gentle on her arm. “Waiting here while you leave… it splits my spirit to the bone. I feel completely unbalanced.”

His intensity almost unbalanced her. “Sounds like the romance author talking,” Rey tried to joke. “Is that a callback to Captain Wentworth?”

“‘Half-agony, half-hope’,” Ben murmured. “Sounds about right.”

On a clear day, when the only other sounds would be their breathing and birdsong, perhaps the words would have struck her differently. At that moment, though, the rain narrowed her world to just Ben and the slight space between them. 

_Dynasties topple in moments like this,_ she found herself thinking. _Empires rise and fall on the look in his eyes._ A second of weakness on her part and they would be on the road, leaving everything they owned behind them. By nightfall he would be fucking her in his bed and she would never leave.

 _And would that be so bad?_ she wondered as his hand cupped her cheek. Would it be such a betrayal to leave a hopeless situation and settle into her own version of a happily ever after?

 _No,_ she decided. _And yes._

She slipped away, scrambling through the rain into her own vehicle. 

When Rey left the parking lot of the hotel, she saw him in the rear-view mirror: standing in the pouring rain, seemingly oblivious to the water soaking him to the skin. 

\- - -

A weight as infinitesimal as cobwebs draped over her the second she stepped inside.

 _Just watching?_ she wondered as she gave the entry hall a sweeping glance, finding nothing more than dust and gray, watery light. _Or do you know that I believe?_

Quiet voices drew her further in, toward the room that lay to the south. Rey could hear snatches of conversation as she walked, some words starkly clear even as others blurred beyond incomprehension.

“…the wall…”

“…we…no…”

“Don’t…she…”

Her crew looked up when she entered the room, unexpected gravity on their faces. They stood in a loose knot near the mystery wall, bodies angled to subtly exclude her from their group. 

“Good morning,” Rey said, the greeting sounding out of place in the air between them, words twisted and threadbare. She met their gazes one by one, trying to decide who had notified Holdo and _why_. Had it been of their own volition, or had the house whispered poison into their ears?

No way to tell now, she decided. And it hardly mattered. The damage had been done, and her exit date practically set in stone.

 _Let Snap’s arrival be a surprise,_ she thought, meaning to cross the room to meet them but somehow lacking the impetus within her to move. Rey spoke into the silence instead, face carefully neutral. “We have the remainder of the week to finish the second floor. Let’s get to it.”

The others exchanged speaking looks, but followed her upstairs with all the emotional remove of a group of strangers. 

_Beginning work,_ she texted Ben, deciding not to mention her crew’s strange behavior. _You should do the same._

 _Hard to focus on a love scene under these circumstances,_ he sent back within seconds. 

_Try anyway._

Rey shoved the phone back into her pocket, ignoring the vibration of a return message as the whine of a circular saw biting into wood filled the air. She would finish her work, she told herself firmly, ignoring the way the skin at the back of her neck prickled. She would finish her work, and when Snap arrived she would wait, and-

She looked toward the doorway for the master bedroom. And she would start on that damn room, Rey decided, walking with determination the ten or so feet between her and the red-drenched threshold. The window had to be removed, the carpet torn up, the hardwood cut away. 

_The window first,_ she thought grimly, knowing that if a buyer wasn’t already lined up she would have been very tempted to ‘accidentally’ shatter the glass. 

_Still am tempted,_ she admitted to herself, then stopped abruptly at the door, just short of the red light. A whispered obscenity dropped from her lips, the feeling of watchfulness from all around seeming to multiply.

The bed-frame was still inside. The chest was still inside. Every bit of molding was _still_ affixed to the walls. 

Rey didn’t need to check her notes to know that all of the above should already have been removed from the premises, or at the very least carried down to the entry hall. Hadn’t she personally helped move that headboard? She could vaguely remember the weight of the wood, the annoying sting of a splinter too small to see in the meat of her palm.

She didn’t turn at the sound of footsteps, too struck by the sight in front of her. Had she hallucinated the whole process, or was she even now seeing exactly what the house wanted her to see?

Rose stopped beside her. “Looks like you missed a spot,” she said, her tone unreadable. 

“Looks like I did,” Rey agreed numbly. Behind schedule, now. Just one more thing against her. 

Taking in a deep breath, Rey stepped forward into the light.


	8. a legally binding agreement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, dear readers! Please note that the tags have been updated and act accordingly. I'm not planning for the violence ahead to be very graphic at all, but I would rather be safe than accidentally trigger someone.

It happened like this: the car broke down (or so she was told), and Padmé missed a doctor’s appointment. She rescheduled for a week out, consoling herself with the knowledge that she _was_ feeling better after so much rest, and the babies were as active as ever. 

_Two more months,_ she thought as she watched the skin of her belly ripple. _Maybe less._

On the morning of her next appointment, Anakin had a seizure.

Or so she was told. 

What she _knew_ was that her breakfast was interrupted by a crash and Sheev calling frantically for the others, and before Padmé could even reach the top of the stairs the front door had slammed shut, leaving her alone in an empty house. 

“It can’t be time yet,” she said aloud in horrified disbelief, leaning against the wall as a wave of nausea passed over her. “Not yet, not without me, _not yet._ ”

In tears she made her way back down the hall, bypassing the door of her own room in favor of the rosy glow of the master. Anakin’s bed was a wreck: blankets and sheets in twisted tangles and pillows flung haphazardly to the floor. The remnants of a breakfast tray were strewn over the carpet, plate broken into several pieces. 

She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what had happened. It was entirely possible that her husband was dying even now, and she should _be_ there with him, and yet she had been left behind and forgotten. 

Padmé did the only thing she could, at that moment: she awkwardly pulled herself up onto her marriage bed, curling up amidst the wreckage in hopes of catching Anakin’s scent from the bed-linens. Nothing- just disinfectant and a hint of sweat. 

When Sheev finally returned with his friends and her husband late in the evening, he was all apologies and consolations. 

“Just a blip,” he said, as if Anakin weren’t steadily declining. “It will probably happen again.”

Padmé stroked her husband’s hair as he slumbered restlessly, and- for the next several days, at least- completely forgot about calling her doctor. 

\- - -

The light had its own weight, practically draping around her as soft and stifling as velvet. “Rose,” Rey said with as much composure as she could muster, “please-”

But Rose was gone when Rey glanced back over her shoulder, and when she stepped back to the doorway to peer out the other woman was nowhere in sight. “Nice,” she muttered, leaving the bedroom to roust a spare pair of hands. “Guys, I need help moving a few pieces of furniture downstairs,” Rey called, walking at a fast clip down the hall. Each room she passed was equally empty, the only sound she could hear her own footfalls. 

_Not even nine, and they’re already on break?_ she thought. Another empty room, and another, and another, and-

Rey stopped and took a step back. Carpet wall to wall, in a room where half the sub-floor should be showing. Pulling her phone from her back pocket, she ignored the handful of messages from Ben and opened the photo app. 

Her screen showed carpet. The taken photograph showed carpet. Her every breath echoed like a damn bell. 

“ _Guys,_ ” she called sharply, almost running down the stairs. “I need to talk to you _right now._ ”

No one on the stairs, or in the entry hall, or waiting when she burst out onto the porch, stopping just before where rain streamed down from the overhang above. 

Her phone vibrated in her hand. 

_What do you want for dinner tonight?_

The incredibly banal question steadied her, a little. _I think I’m seeing things,_ she wanted to send back. _I think the house just ate my crew,_ she considered texting. 

_Anything,_ she sent instead, protectiveness stealing over her despite the fear she still felt. For the moment, at least, Ben Solo belonged to her. Like hell would she allow some _house_ to steal him away.

Rey turned back to face the front door, filled with sudden reckless defiance. “They’re _also_ mine,” she said firmly, not a single tremor to her voice. “You can’t have them.”

And then the door opened and Poe stared out at her, looking annoyed and distinctly unimpressed. “Good time on that sprint,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “We need your help in one of the other rooms; we’ll clear out the master later.”

Normally, hierarchy within the team was barely referenced. Rey didn’t believe in micromanaging, and preferred to set a schedule and then turn her crew loose to do what they did best. Requests like Poe’s- couched in a far friendlier tone- weren’t unusual and rarely annoyed her. 

This, though, felt distinctly like an order, and Rey had only a split second to decide on her response. Press back against his presumption, or go along with it, knowing that she only had a few days remaining anyway?

In the end, it was the way she quailed against returning to the master bedroom that decided her. “Let’s get to it, then,” she replied coolly, and followed him back inside. 

Behind his back, she made a vulgar hand gesture aimed directly at the house. 

_Juvenile,_ she admitted to herself. _But satisfying._

\- - -

“Have you considered just risking a kidnapping charge?” Ruwee had asked semi-seriously when he had called with an update, and the longer Ben thought on the idea the more tempted he was by it. Rey might be slow to forgive, but getting her out alive would be worth angering her, at least theoretically.

Unless she refused to ever see him again, which definitely went counter to his hopes and kept him from making any firm plans to _actually_ lock her in his trunk and leave Mustafar for the rest of his life. 

The relief he felt when he finally heard her door open sent him half-running into the suite next door, where he pulled her into his arms before her bag had even hit the floor. 

“I like this greeting,” Rey said, wearing her own look of relief as she wrapped her arms around his neck. He realized rather belatedly that her feet weren’t even on the ground, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Hi,” she mumbled against his throat, the skin of her face chilled. “One day down, three to go.”

“Are you hurt?” She didn’t seem to be anything but tired, but he had learned that Rey was very used to hiding her hurts, whether they be mental or physical. 

“I’m fine.” Her lips brushed against his skin in a way that didn’t feel accidental. “Let me take a shower, and then we’ll talk.”

He let her slip to the floor. “Do you need me to scrub your back, sweetheart?”

She quirked a grin at him. “I thought the goal was to avoid sex,” Rey said as she walked toward the dresser, pulling the elastic from one of her buns as she did so. 

“You underestimate my self-control,” he teased, watching as she began pulling clothing from the drawers. 

“Impressed by it, actually.” Rey held a pair of socks in her hands, staring down at the small bundle as if it were immensely interesting. “And intrigued, because I have the feeling that when we do end up having sex, you’re going to be very… intense.” She glanced at him, her smile almost shy. “In a good way.”

“I can’t claim learned skill, but I can definitely offer enthusiasm,” Ben said as he drew closer, reaching out to loosen the second of her buns. “I have every intention of learning how to please you.”

“Just me?” she asked, fingers curling tightly over the balled socks. 

“Just you.” He leaned in, pressing a kiss to her temple. “Go take your shower, sweetheart.”

When she finally walked into his suite nearly twenty minutes later, she was yawning into her palm as her wet hair dampened patches of her sweatshirt. “I’m seeing things,” she offered before he could do more than appreciate how adorable she looked in her almost over-sized clothing. “At the house.”

“What kind of things?” he asked worriedly, pulling her down onto the couch with him. 

“The past, maybe.” Rey arranged herself half on his lap, catching one of his hands between hers. “And somehow we missed stripping the master bedroom.”

The way her brow creased told him a lot. “You don’t think you missed it?”

“I remember carrying out the furniture last week,” she replied with a sigh, running her fingertips along his hand in a way that seemed idle. “But it’s still there. And then my team disappeared, and a room half-stripped of hardwood suddenly had carpet again, and I ran out of the house like a _fool_ … and then my crew reappears and acts like I’m a mad woman.” Rey looked up at him, her gaze dry. “I felt like one.”

“Something similar happened with my parents,” he said slowly, memories he had half-suppressed trickling back. “They were rehabbing the bathroom on the first floor, and it seemed like the entire process was one step forward, three steps back. They would replace a fixture or paint a wall, and the next day it was as if nothing had changed.” 

Which had led to quite a number of fights, as time went on. The last one- mere hours before his uncle’s attempt on Ben’s life- had been so loud that he had been able to follow the thread of their argument from two floors above them. “I never liked the master bedroom,” he admitted. “Something about that window always made me wary.”

“It isn’t natural,” she agreed, a distant look appearing on her face. “That light… I’ve never felt anything like it.”

Ben had spent the past fifteen years trying to forget everything about that particular month, including his mother’s almost obsessive research after the fact. Slowly it came back to him, in drips and drabs. “The house was built by a retired surgeon by the name of Edward Snoke.”

Rey’s gaze sharpened again as he spoke, her fingers stilling their movement over his hand. 

“Apparently he just showed up one day, blueprints in hand,” Ben continued. “Hired locals to build the house. Paid up front, and generously, so he had plenty of willing workers… even _after_ the accidents started happening.”

“How many accidents?” she asked.

“More than average. A lot of blood was spilled on the foundations.” He paused. “And some people just disappeared entirely.”

Buried beneath the cellar floor, some accounts opined. Never proven, but likely. 

“What about the window?”

“He commissioned it from an artisan in Asheville.” A drop of water fell from her hair to land on his wrist, directing his attention to the hands that held his. Small and strong, bearing callouses and little nicked scars. “Apparently the glass-worker’s home caught fire several months later. His entire family died, though I suppose that could just be a coincidence.”

“Very little about this house feels like a coincidence,” she replied, looking weary. “This all sounds like something from a horror novel. It’s going to be a while before I voluntarily read or watch anything spooky.”

“Honestly, even during my suffering artist phase I couldn’t bring myself to touch the horror genre.” Ben leaned his forehead against her damp hair, closing his eyes as he inhaled the light scent of lavender. “I want to bring you home with me,” he murmured. “Let me take you back to Manteo. I don’t need to see the house come down; I just need to get you out.”

Foolish of him to even come to town in the first place. Maybe the house had had its hooks in him even then, whispering how he would never be _sure_ unless he saw the destruction with his own eyes.

“You know I can’t abandon my crew,” she said in an equally quiet tone. “Don’t tempt me, Ben.”

“Sorry.” A soft kiss to her temple. “Dinner?”

“Okay.” 

She continued to lean against him, her body limp in a way that was less relaxation and more a desperate kind of relief, as if she had been holding herself together by the skin of her teeth the entire day. “Stay with me tonight?” he asked in a murmur, resisting the urge to beg. On some level he needed her tucked into bed right next to him, within arm’s reach. “Please?”

“Yes.” Rey squeezed his hand gently. “I’m not used to being touched,” she continued, her voice still very quiet, “but I think I could become addicted to you, Ben Solo.”

His breath seemed to catch in his throat at her words, and she gave him a quizzical look at the sound. “Ben?”

“I’d like that,” he admitted when he could again speak. “My parents rarely touched me, after the house.”

In the years since he had received the occasional hug from Ruwee, and Bazine had freely shown affection during their short relationship, but there had been little else. Ben suspected that he could become just as addicted to Rey as she might to him. 

“Dinner,” he said again, slipping out from under her to fetch the aluminum pan from the small oven set on warm. “I hope you like lasagna; the local Italian restaurant is actually pretty good.”

Ben glanced back at her after the pan was safely on top of the stove, her silence seeming to have weight. Rey smiled with surprising brightness when their gazes met. “You seem to have a penchant for feeding me,” she said in explanation, plucking at the hem of her sweatshirt with her fingers. “I’ve always thought the whole thing about love languages was a bit silly, but you might have stumbled on mine.”

Such an easy thing to give, food. Ben suddenly felt very fortunate that he enjoyed cooking, and- according to Ruwee- was actually rather good at it. “You’ll have to tell me your favorites,” he said as he looked away, reaching for a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. There was a depth of emotion in his voice that he didn’t even try to hide. 

Her arms wrapped around him from behind as he carefully cut the seal on the bottle, her head resting between his shoulder blades. “We’re avoiding sex, remember?” Rey said, a hint of humor in her voice. “Stop trying to seduce me.”

Ben huffed a laugh, dropping the scrap of foil to the counter. “Would you rather have bread and water, then?” he asked teasingly, working the corkscrew into the cork. “I think I have a sleeve of saltines somewhere around here.”

“No.” Slight concentrated pressure against his back: the merest ghost a kiss. “I want lasagna. And wine.” She paused, one hand slipping down to the button closure of his jeans. “And maybe dessert.”

Ben stared down at the fully-embedded corkscrew, _very_ aware of his own erection straining against denim. “We’re avoiding sex,” he echoed. “If I’m not allowed to seduce you, you aren’t allowed to seduce me.”

“Not even an evil house could get me pregnant through a hand job,” she replied, her tone persuasive in its utter practicality. “Honestly, if it manages to do _that_ I would have to applaud out of sincere if baffled admiration.”

He couldn’t trust himself to lever the cork out, not yet. “I want to see you pregnant,” he admitted in a low voice. “I want to feel our child kicking against my palm.”

Rey didn’t back away, but continued to lean against him. “If anyone else said that I would run,” she said in a remarkably contented tone. “For the moment, at least, I’ve given up trying to understand why you feel like home.” Another ghost of a kiss. He settled his hands flat against the counter. “We have bigger problems to worry about,” she added, that practicality back again.

Ben released a breath, a kind of decisiveness settling over him. “Step back, sweetheart.”

When she did, he slid the pan back into the oven and turned before she could question him. “Dessert sounds nice,” Ben said with a straight face, and then stooped to drape her over his shoulder. 

She squeaked in surprise, the sound so adorable he immediately grinned in response. “ _Ben._ ”

He didn’t move toward the bedroom, instead remaining in the small kitchenette with one arm behind her thighs. “Will you let me taste you, sweetheart?” Ben asked, turning his head slightly to kiss her hip. “I’ll be gentle.”

One of her hands grabbed the back of his shirt, pulling the fabric taut. “You don’t have to.”

If she had sounded at all reluctant or afraid, he would have immediately put her down and apologized. Her breathy, intrigued tone, though, was very encouraging.

“But I _want_ to.” 

As he spoke he finally began to move, walking the brief number of steps toward the bed. “I told you I wanted to please you.”

He dropped her onto the bed, watching as she bounced slightly. “Unless you don’t like it,” he added in a half-questioning tone as he dropped to his knees in front of her, his fingers hooking into the waistband of her sweatpants. 

“My experience is limited,” she replied, propping herself up on her elbows to watch him. “It’s been a… a rarity.”

“Lazy,” Ben replied, his disapproving tone firmly aimed at whoever had dared disappoint her. “Do I have your permission, Rey?”

She looked at him for a long moment, eyes wide and eager. “Yes,” she said finally, and licked her lips as a fine blush pinkened her cheeks. 

His experience in this particular matter was also limited, but upon dragging her sweatpants and underwear down her long, muscular legs he found that it didn’t really matter- as he had told her earlier, he had enthusiasm to spare. 

Enthusiasm for _her_ , to be specific. Enthusiasm for the taste of her on his tongue, the way her hips rolled under his mouth, and the utterly delightful noises she made when he slipped two fingers inside of her and crooked them gently forward. 

“ _Ben._ ”

Just a strained whisper, but everything seemed to be in that slight bit of sound: joy and sweet befuddlement and _need_. She bucked her hips, constrained by the arm he had pressed over her abdomen. “Ben, _please, please._ ”

“Please?” he repeated wickedly, and blew a stream of air against her sensitive flesh, making her shiver. “What do you want, sweetheart?”

“Monster,” she hissed, her seeming irritation unconvincing. 

“Yes, I am,” Ben agreed with a grin, then made her whine with a flick of his tongue. 

After, when she was soft and loose-limbed on the bed- and thoroughly lovely in that state- he reclined beside her, carefully untangling her hair with his fingers. “Let me touch you,” Rey murmured, looking up at him tenderly. 

“If you like.” He cupped the side of her face in one hand, stroking along her cheekbone with his thumb. “You still need to eat.”

Her tenderness abruptly turned predatory. “I do like,” Rey shot back, and in an instant had him pinned beneath her. The fact that she was still bare from the waist down didn’t even seem to register in her mind, though she did glance down after straddling his hips, her skin directly against his jeans. “You are very proportionate,” she said in an admiring fashion, grinning when she saw his blush. 

“I’ve never made comparisons.” Ben watched as her nimble fingers slipped the button from its loop, letting out an excited breath as she dragged the zipper down. “Again, I don’t expect anything.”

Rey met his gaze, her expression almost solemn even as a slight smile played over her lips. “Do I have your permission, Ben?”

“Yes.” And then she was tugging his jeans down as he lifted his hips, his erection pressing eagerly against the confines of his underwear. “ _Please_.”

She abandoned his jeans to the floor, palming him over the cloth. “I like to have my dessert first, too,” she told him with a smirk, and then all he could think was an unsteady blend of Rey and Rey’s mouth and her clever, clever fingers, shattering his composure so completely that when she was done he could only curl around her body, pressing his face to her clothed breasts. 

“I’m coming back here tomorrow night,” Rey said quietly, petting his hair in slow, sleepy strokes. “And the night after that, and the night after that, until my work is finished.”

Her certainty did make him feel a little better, even if the house had never honored certainty in the century and change it had been in existence. “I’m going to take you home,” he murmured into her sweatshirt. “I’m going to light a fire and make you tea, and then I’m going to fuck you into the mattress.”

She sucked in a breath, and before he could worry that he had offended her with his bluntness her hand appeared in his limited field of vision. “Pinky swear?” she asked, quirking her little finger toward him. 

“Pinky swear,” he replied, hooking her finger with his and not letting go. 

Rey made a sound of satisfaction. “Very legally binding, that,” she said, stretching as best she could with him half on top of her. Her free hand patted him on the back. “Food?”

Ben didn’t want to move, was entirely too comfortable to move, but the reminder that she needed to be fed had him on his feet and grabbing a nearby pair of pajama pants. “I bought _a lot_ of lasagna.”

Rey grinned as she pulled on her underwear. “Talk dirty to me, Solo.”

She just grinned harder when he stepped toward her, a peal of laughter escaping her mouth as he slung her over his shoulder a second time. “Feed me,” Rey demanded teasingly, her hand slapping his ass at an awkward angle. “Wine and pasta, _now._ ”

As he dropped her onto the couch- watching her bounce again, mussed hair framing her face and bare legs tempting him to touch- he realized that he was entirely happy. 

And though that was a dangerous emotion in Mustafar- one that, in his experience, always heralded disaster- he still leaned in to brush a kiss over her forehead, allowing himself the luxury of joy.


	9. shift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My deepest thanks to all my readers- your comments, kudos, reblogs, and bookmarks inspire me to keep writing. 
> 
> If you're on tumblr, my handle there is also lachesisgrimm. Come say hi!

It happened like this: as each day passed, Padmé grew more and more certain that something was wrong with her house-mates. It was nothing she could pinpoint- they gave every appearance of being normal, but their odd sidelong glances and the way the car and the phone always seemed to be unavailable at inconvenient times put her on edge, and more than once Padmé had sensed _someone_ creeping into her room in the dead of night. She kept her mouth shut about all of it, unsure if she had grown truly paranoid or if she had legitimate reason to fear, and if the latter… well, best no one know. 

She spent an entire day pretending to read as the unexpected sound of construction drifted up from the first floor, rubbing her belly for comfort as her children kicked. 

“Are you doing repairs downstairs?” she asked Sheev in a purposefully casual tone when he arrived with her dinner tray. 

“Just building a few bookcases,” he replied, his look of deep satisfaction somehow incompatible with his words. “What a house this is, Mé. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Once Padmé had loved her home for her husband’s sake. Now she couldn’t wait to be rid of it. “Would you like to buy it?” 

She shrugged when he raised a brow, surprised. “After the twins come, and…”

Padmé paused, still not wanting to say the words, and he nodded in understanding. “I know,” he said.

“I’m going to move back to Charleston.” She broke apart the roll on her plate, a hint of steam wafting up into the air. “My sister still lives there. I want to raise the twins where I grew up.”

Sheev was silent for a moment. “Anakin would want you to raise his children here,” he said finally, a faintly chiding note in his voice. “You know that.”

Padmé slowly ate a piece of her roll, holding back a snappish retort. _Her_ children. Anakin’s too, yes, but going forward they would be entirely her responsibility, and how _dare_ Sheev question her. 

“I want my family close by,” she said firmly yet gently after swallowing. “Anakin would want me to be somewhere that makes me feel happy and comfortable, and moving back to familiar territory will do that. I’ve made up my mind, Sheev.”

At some point in her short speech he had looked toward the window, where daylight was rapidly fading. “Very well.” He nodded, his jaw tensing slightly. “I’ll speak with my bank and see if I can arrange a loan.”

Padmé released a breath she hadn’t even realized that she had been holding. “Thank you.” 

“Of course.” His smile lacked… something. “You’ll have to bring the children for a visit.”

“I will.”

She would not, and knew that with bone-deep certainty. Padmé had no intention of ever returning to this house again. There was too much pain, here; the walls seemed almost to exhale it. 

“Your doctor is making a house-call tomorrow, right?” he asked as she resumed eating.

“After he finishes work in town.”

She wished he were coming that very evening. Dr. Kenobi was an uncertain ally, but he was the only one she had- and time seemed to be in short supply. Her sense of looming dread was inexplicable and ever-increasing. 

_One more day,_ she thought. _One more day._

\- - -

Rey could hear the storm even before she was properly awake, wind and rain audible against the bedroom window. Behind her Ben grumbled in his sleep, his arm tightening around her waist. 

_He puts out heat like a furnace,_ she thought sleepily as he snuffled against her hair. _And cuddles like an octopus._

He cuddled to the extent of nearly pinning her to the mattress, one of his legs tangled with hers, and she _liked_ it. Really liked it, to the point where she almost forgot why they were both there in the first place. 

_What care I for evil houses when there is such a man?_ she thought with dark amusement, paraphrasing Marianne Dashwood. Such a man, with his dexterous hands and clever tongue and words that had made her happy before they had even met. Such a man, who was generous with his food and made no bones about the fact that he was looking for more than a casual fling.

Such a man, whose erection was pressed firmly against her backside, tempting her to shimmy her hips invitingly. 

_Be good,_ Rey reminded herself. _Plenty of time for that later._

She hoped. Her status as a newly converted believer to the supernatural had shaken the optimism she wore like armor. Who knew if tomorrow would come when something as ineffable as invisible, conscious evil loomed over their heads? If a house could heal itself- or at the very least appear to heal itself- how could she even _attempt_ to plan more than ten minutes ahead?

Behind her Ben sighed in his sleep, the sound edged in pleasure as his hips rocked against hers. Rey squirmed a little in response, her body perfectly ready to receive whatever intimate attentions his might offer. If it weren’t for his worry over getting her pregnant- a worry she didn’t quite understand, seeing as she was on birth control, but seemed nonsensically par for the course considering the week she was having- she would probably wake him with an invitation.

This was nice, though, she decided as the leg between hers slid up between her thighs and he ground against her ass. Very nice. _Exceptionally_ nice, perhaps, even if or maybe because of how she felt the desperate urge to beg him to shift his leg higher, to thrust harder, to slip his hand into her underwear. 

“Ben.” Her voice sounded a little strangled in the dark, and he nuzzled his nose against her hair in some sort of instinctive response. “ _Ben._ ”

“Hmm?”

Not quite awake, not quite asleep. His thigh shifted upward again, right where she wanted him. At her gasp he stiffened, and for one long moment she thought that he might untangle himself from her completely. 

“Are you awake, sweetheart?” he asked finally. “Is this okay?”

“Yes. Very okay. Please.”

Ben chuckled, pressing his thigh upward to increase the pressure. “Sweet Rey. You love being touched, don’t you?” 

He was rocking almost lazily against her, in absolutely no hurry now that he was awake. Rey had the startled thought that he was a natural at this, at _her_ , as if he had come hardwired with the ability to set her alight. 

“You’re so wet for me,” he murmured with approval when he slipped his hand between cloth and skin, fingertips stroking against her. “How long did you wait to wake me up?”

“Not long,” she admitted shakily, too constrained by his hold to move. “You are a tease.”

“You like it,” he replied with cocky certainty, and she couldn’t exactly argue with that. His index finger circled her clit, barely touching her where she so desperately needed to be touched. “Don’t you?”

“Yes.” She’d like it better if she were flat on her belly and he were fully seated inside her, but Rey knew well the value of appreciating what she had. “But the alarm is going to go off any minute.”

“Fair point.” 

And maybe he remembered at that moment that their time truly was short, because he crooned almost incomprehensible words into her hair as he rutted against her, his fingers working until she came with a quiet scream muffled by her pillow.

“Perfect,” she heard him growl before his hips stuttered and his arms tightened around her.

“Is it just me,” she said a bit dazedly into the silence that followed, “or are we almost absurdly good at this?”

“If this is where we start, I’m going to die a very happy man of overexertion,” he answered, his body somehow heavier now that pleasure-loosened limbs caged her in. “If your alarm goes off before my heartbeat regulates I’m going smash it.”

“Don’t smash my phone,” Rey muttered sleepily, though she agreed with him. _Don’t ring,_ she thought, almost begging the universe. 

And it didn’t, for nearly ten minutes- long enough to put Rey back into charity with the idea of dragging herself out of bed. 

She left him that morning with a fervent kiss, and- swearing because her umbrella was still in her truck- darted out into the rain. 

\- - -

_Call me immediately._

Ben frowned down at his cell, his lips still buzzing with the ghost of Rey’s kiss. Despite the hour, he dialed his cousin’s number. 

“Bebe is fine,” she said on answering, her voice sounding thin and strained. “Woke me up, actually; I thanked her with a whole can of tuna.”

Nausea stirred in his stomach as he sat heavily on the couch. “What does that mean?”

“It means I had the most vivid nightmare in years, last night, and it involved some strange woman eviscerating you.” Ruwee huffed loudly, and even over the line he could tell that she was trying not to cry. “I swear to God, Ben, if you get killed I will… I will put Bebe in a tutu and train her to do circus tricks.”

He smirked despite himself, a chill running along his nerves. “She needs to lose weight.”

“I’ll monetize your damn cat, Ben. She’ll have a fucking agent.”

“Bebe might like that; she loves attention.”

“Fuck you.” There was a sound like a cabinet slamming on her end. “You were in the master bedroom beside that damn window, and a woman spilled your guts on the fucking carpet. And the more I screamed the more some invisible prick laughed.”

Ben rubbed a hand over his face, suddenly bone-tired. Ruwee believed in the house, and Ruwee was not the type to throw around baseless suppositions. “What did she look like?”

Ruwee hesitated. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “Everything was red light and shadow.”

 _Rey_ , Ben thought instinctively, because of course the house would use her as bait and then use her as a weapon. The house had turned his grandparents against each other, and his parents- though in that case, the spilling of Ben’s blood had been enough to break their enmity- and now the woman he might grow to love would be turned against him. 

_Very neat and tidy_ , the author in him offered reluctantly. _End where you began._

“You,” Ben began carefully, “are going to stay just where you are.”

He had shifted from fatigue to sorrow to an odd kind of calm resignation in less than a minute, and for all of his caution- for Ruwee might very well attempt to join him out of love and loyalty- there was indisputable fondness in his voice. He loved her, too, his bossy, brilliant cousin.

“Ben-”

“You’re going to take care of my cat, and if that involves pimping her out for memes I trust you to do it in a safe and responsible fashion.”

“ _Ben-_ ”

“And I am going to save Rey, even if it ends with one more ghost in that terrible house.” He paused at her audible sob. “You are my heir, you know,” he continued calmly. “If you do inherit, hire someone to destroy the place. Don’t come to Mustafar. Knock down every wall, and then sell the land and go on an extravagant vacation.”

“You fucker,” she muttered. 

“And if you want to write a tell-all article about your cousin Kay Ren, you have my permission to make up all kinds of wild stories about me,” he continued. “Like that time I completed the Kessel Run in twelve minutes.”

She snorted. “Thirty minutes, more like, and in the middle of the pack.”

“Hush.”

He hung up without a goodbye, realizing that he couldn’t bear to give her one. When his phone rang again barely a minute later, Ruwee’s name prominent on the screen, he ignored it.

He had a book to finish, after all. 

\- - -

The front door shut behind Rey with a loud thud, and immediately her team rounded on her. 

“Everything has changed.” Finn was pacing, looking as if he were trying to solve a complex mathematical equation just beyond his comprehension. “Rey, the rooms are furnished again. The attic is _full._ ”

She stayed exactly where she was, barely twitching even a finger. The day before her crew had overlooked- forgotten?- rooms shifting from half-stripped to fully carpeted, and today they were either imagining the rooms in their previous state or maybe, maybe, they were seeing the _truth_ and Rey had never helped haul furniture from the attic. Maybe if she walked up every flight of stairs she would come face to face with the wardrobe that had nearly killed her-

 _Not an accident,_ she understood suddenly, scrubbing damp palms against her jeans. 

-and maybe it would topple again and crush her to the floor. 

With almost desperate resolve Rey drew in a breath and pulled her phone from a pocket. “I’ll call Pava,” she gritted out, and scrolled through her contacts as Poe glowered at her from his seat on the stairs. 

“Hey, Rey,” Jess answered, her voice an odd mix of coolness and curiosity, and from that alone Rey knew that whatever Holdo had heard had filtered through the ranks to Jess, and likely in an exaggerated form. “What’s up?”

Rey forced herself to reply in a nonchalant manner, as if her entire life weren’t falling apart around her ears. “Just wanted to make sure everything arrived okay. Any problems?”

“Nope.” A tinge of warmth- that of a job well done- appeared in Jess’ voice. “Barely a knick on the journey. That carved bed will keep the lights on for the next year, at the very least.”

Rey lifted her gaze to the top of the stairs, thinking of how very real that same bed had seemed just the day before. “Good,” she replied with as much as enthusiasm as she could muster. “That’s… good.”

There was a pause and then a rustle on the other end of the line, as if Jess were walking swiftly away from something or someone. “Is it true?” she asked after a few moments more in a low voice. “About the client?”

Rey thought rather inappropriately of Ben’s fingers on her clit barely two hours before. “What about him?”

“That he sold the salvage rights cheaply because you’re… together.”

Rey felt a surge of indignation. “I first met him _after_ he sold the rights,” she said as quietly and calmly as she could manage, turning slightly away from her crew. “The price was his decision.”

“Huh.” Another pause, one loaded with unspoken meaning. “Well.”

Rey could almost hear _I guess you’re making up the difference_ and had no clue whether that was an accurate read of the situation or her house-induced paranoia. “I’ll let you go, then.” She drew in a deep breath, then another, silence on the other end of the line. “I’m sure you’re busy.”

“Bye, Rey.” Jess’ tone turned wry. “Have fun.”

Doing her best to quell the tremor in her hands, Rey pocketed her phone. “Pava says that everything on the manifest arrived safely.”

Rose snorted, crossing her arms defiantly as Poe came to his feet and Finn gave her a _you cannot be serious_ look. “The rooms are full,” Rose shot back. “ _Full,_ Rey. Fucking full.”

“You call Pava, then.” Rey immediately regretted her snappish tone and lifted her hands in a conciliatory manner. “Look, I think we should all leave.”

Because they should. Screw professionalism; Rey wanted to live, and she wanted her people to live.

The three stared at her, then exchanged a look. Despite the house’s machinations they appeared as tightly bonded as ever- perhaps even more so, in a way that struck Rey as unsettling.

“Leave,” Finn said, as if testing the word for the first time, giving her a quick glance. He looked back toward Rose and Finn. “Should we leave, do you think?”

“I think Holdo expects us to work until Snap arrives, don’t you?” Poe replied in a eerie echo of Finn’s sudden calmness, the flat tone so unlike him Rey’s breath caught in her throat. “Even _if_ Rey and the client are working behind our backs.”

“I told you,” Rey managed to force out, her voice thin and strained, “Pava says everything arrived intact.”

“We didn’t hear that.”

Rey turned her attention to Rose, feeling as if the door at her back were a solid, impenetrable wall. “What?”

“You looked like you were on the phone, but for all we know you were talking to yourself.” Rose uncrossed her arms, reaching for something tucked just out of Rey’s line of sight. “Meanwhile, the house is _intact._ ”

Rose drew out a sledgehammer, and for one wild moment Rey wondered if _this_ was how she died, broken by her own friends, but Poe accepted the tool from Rose and turned toward the southern part of the house. 

“What are you doing?” Rey demanded, feeling whatever remaining vestiges of control she had over the situation pulled from her hands. “ _Poe!_ ”

“Something a bit harder for you to fix,” he replied as she gave chase, only to be cut off by Finn and Rose. 

“It isn’t _me,_ ” Rey insisted, trying to dodge past his protectors as Poe grew ever closer to the southern wall. “It’s the fucking _house._ There’s something evil here, I swear.”

“Ghosts?” Poe mocked, a swagger in his steps. “Practical, logical Rey, talking about _haints_ of all things.”

Rey attempted to shoulder her way through Rose and Finn and was bounced back, nearly losing her footing. “Do _not_ open that wall!”

“Why not?”

Rose sounded quieter than usual, her eyes narrowed and sharp. “Why not, Rey?”

“There is something wrong behind that wall.” Rey didn’t know what, but the closer they came the more her stomach twisted into knots. “Please leave with me. We’ll go get some breakfast. We’ll all go _home_.”

There was a note in Finn’s expression which made her think that maybe, maybe she was getting through to him, but then he grabbed her arm and hauled her further into the room as Poe drew back, the sledgehammer poised in the air for a split-second before arcing toward the wall. 

_I’m going to break my promise,_ she thought as plaster and wood splintered, dust rising in the air. _I made a fucking pinky swear._

A second blow, then a third, Rey held tightly in place by someone she would normally trust with her life. Poe dropped the sledgehammer carelessly to the floor and pulled out a torch. He aimed the concentrated beam of light through the hole, his face turning oddly blank.

“Quite a family,” Poe commented, his voice distant and somehow not his own. “Never should have left, those twins. They should have walked these halls; carried this legacy.”

Rey’s whispered “What?” spilled unbidden from between her lips. 

“I could always try again.” His stature changed, slightly: back straightening and chin lifting, past Poe’s usual confidence into something strangely elegant. For a brief second he appeared taller and not at all himself. “Another generation. _Acolytes._ ”

Suddenly Ben’s warning about the house’s interest in her womb made an alarming kind of sense. “No one is going to be giving you any _acolytes,_ jackass.”

And then he was Poe again, albeit a Poe who clearly believed _she_ was their current enemy. “Help me,” he said to Finn and Rose, a martial light in his eyes. 

Instinct had Rey dropping low and twisting from Finn’s hands, but surprise gave her only a moment of freedom: Rose slammed into her from the side as Rey darted for the exit, and as she staggered the men grabbed her, almost lifting her from the floor. 

“Stop!” Rey protested at the top of her lungs as they half-carried her toward the stairs, uncaring of how she thrashed in their grip. They were both strong men, but she still would have expected them to show some sign of exertion as she used every bit of her strength to attempt escape. Finn barely blinked when she managed to land a hard kick against his shin, and Poe merely released a grunt when she dug her nails into his arm. “Put me down; put me down _now._ ”

In a sense, they did: without releasing her arms they dropped her closer to the ground, the swift move slamming her knees against the first steps. They dragged her up the rest of the staircase, her knees knocking hard against nearly every rise.

“You’re hurting me,” she managed to say through the pain. “Finn, you’re hurting me. Please stop. _Please._ ”

The house looked at her through Finn’s eyes, through Poe’s, through Rose’s, and with their hands the house threw her into the master bedroom with enough force to send her tumbling to the ground. As Rey struggled to pull herself to her feet the door slammed shut behind her.

All sound, ambient and otherwise, seemed to disappear. 

Rey lifted her gaze to red light and- limping- propped herself against the wall, slowly scanning the room as her heart-rate increased. Chest. Bed-frame. Stained glass. 

The doorknob rattled soundlessly under her hand. One locked door.

“No.”

Her mouth shaped the word, vocal cords and tongue pushing the negation into the world, but still she heard nothing. 

Rey pulled her phone from her pocket, feeling a little more panic at the utter lack of signal. She tried to dial 911 but her phone refused to acknowledge the press of her fingers against the screen. Behind a variety of apps her normally sane crew grinned, beers in their hands and a heap of low country boil on the table between them.

It would let her call Ben, some calm part of her noted. She could call Ben.

 _Fuck that._

Forcing herself to retain some modicum of composure, Rey returned her phone to her pocket and- ignoring the pain and the scream trying to wrest its way forcefully from her throat- turned her attention to the room. 

If she couldn’t escape, she could at least do a fuck ton of damage.

\- - -

Despite the lingering sense of fatalism, Ben had a very productive day- productive enough that he lost track of time, only distracted from work by the vibration of his phone and a text from Rey on the screen. 

_I miss you._

Ben relaxed a little at this sign of life. _I miss you, too._

_I’ll see you soon._

He glanced at the time- nearly three in the afternoon, so perhaps she was leaving a little early. _I can’t wait._

Maybe she would be interested in going out for dinner, he mused as he returned to his work. 

When she wasn’t back within the hour, he didn’t worry. 

When she hadn’t walked in the door by her usual time, he began to walk aimlessly through his suite, phone in hand.

When a new message finally came through after darkness had completely fallen, he breathed a sigh of relief and checked the screen- and froze. 

A picture of a wall, featureless other than the large hole smashed in the center of it. Another text popped up below, the words causing his heart to fumble a beat.

_Time to come home, Ben._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Despite Snoke's/the house's fixation on Rey's uterus, I promise you that there will be no attempted or actual rape in this story.


	10. temptation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go.

It happened like this: Dr. Kenobi arrived as dusk fell, and Padmé greeted him with the same air of blithe calmness that had served her well in other times of trouble. 

And then, while he was examining her and before he could say anything disastrous like _you’re progressing very well,_ she held her open hand in front of his face and waited for him to read the words written on her palm. 

_Need to get out. Danger._

He flicked a glance toward her face, startled, and Padmé allowed the mask she wore to drop, revealing every bit of worry and fear that she carried inside. Something in her expression seemed to strike a chord with him, because he gave her a slight nod and asked, his distracted tone at odds with the concentration on his face, “And how is your husband?”

Perhaps that was his way of trying to figure out if Anakin was the danger she faced, or perhaps not. She replied, her voice still calm, “As well as you might expect. I hope… I hope he’ll still be with me, at the birth.”

“Hmm.” A note of worry crept into that small response, and she looked briefly toward the still-closed door. This play-acting may or may not be necessary, but she couldn’t take the chance that someone lingered in the hall, an ear pressed to the wood. “Your blood pressure is higher than I would like,” Dr. Kenobi continued as he helped her put on shoes, voice clipped and professional. “Have you been experiencing any headaches? Blurred vision?”

No. “Yes,” she replied immediately. “I was beginning to get worried.”

“I think it would be best if I took you to the hospital.” He began packing his bag hurriedly, nodding when she awkwardly moved to the edge of the bed and stood. “I need to run a few tests, and the sooner that gets done the better.”

“If you insist.” Padmé managed to keep her relief from infusing those words. “Anakin-”

He immediately raised a hand, shaking his head _no_. “I’ll have you home sooner if it’s just the two of us.”

Which made sense, even if Padmé felt a pang at leaving her husband behind for even a short time. She didn’t think Anakin was in danger, at least not directly, but he _was_ incapable of defending himself-

She stopped the thought before panic could build up in her mind, forcefully making herself concentrate on the present. _We’ll go to the police, and they can come for him,_ she told herself. _Get out. He would want you out._

The hall was and remained empty as they traversed the distance between her room and the top of the stairs. Dr. Kenobi kept pace beside her as she took each step carefully, one of her hands trailing along the railing, and for a brief moment Padmé thought that maybe, maybe they could leave without a word being said. 

“Is there a problem?”

Sheev appeared in the hall below when they were halfway down the stairs, concern on his face. 

“I’m worried there might be.” Dr. Kenobi’s tone was grave, and she felt a sudden surge of gratefulness that he hadn’t disregarded her plea. “Better to get the tests done now than risk a wait.”

“Of course.” Sheev leveled a look on her that was almost condescending. “You should have said something, Mé.”

She choked back any hint of irritation, instead answering, “I didn’t want to worry you. You have enough to deal with caring for Anakin.”

“We’re family; you can tell me anything.” Sheev turned to Dr. Kenobi as they reached the hall, speaking to the other man as if she had simply ceased to exist. “You’ll have her back tonight?”

“By midnight, I hope.” Dr. Kenobi’s hand came to rest on her upper back, pressing her onward to the door. 

In a move that looked coincidental Sheev stepped in front of her, forcing them both to a halt. “I’m not sure we can do without her for too long,” he said with a fond smile, his gaze flicking over her shoulder. “Anakin, come and bid your wife farewell.”

If he had addressed one of his own friends Padmé would have detoured around him, but she couldn’t _not_ turn to her husband at the moment of their (hopefully brief) separation- though she did feel her resolve crumble a little when she saw Anakin’s feverish and shadowed countenance, the hands she loved so much hanging limply by his sides. 

_In sickness and in health_ seemed to weigh heavily on her, at that moment. 

“Padmé,” Anakin said, his voice oddly distant. “Where are you going?”

“The hospital.” She clasped one of his lax hands in hers the moment he stepped close, the wedding band he still wore pressing against her palms. “For the babies.”

He looked down at her bulging abdomen with a kind of blank surprise. “What?”

“I told you,” Sheev said patiently, and though the words were unexceptional Anakin lifted his head in a way that made Padmé wonder _what_ Sheev had told him. “She’s going with him.”

Dr. Kenobi tensed beside her even as she was trying to puzzle out what the hell _that_ meant- and then Anakin’s free hand was clasped around her throat, the move so unexpected she lost several precious seconds to complete shock. 

“ _Padmé,_ ” Anakin hissed as she struggled to breathe, her brain repeating _what what why_ at an ever-increasing speed. “You brought him here to kill me.”

 _He sounds so hurt,_ was all she could think, unsure where, exactly, her path had diverged from the ordinary and sane, or why Anakin thought her doctor wanted to _kill_ him. 

“Let her go, Anakin,” Dr. Kenobi said sternly, stopping short of stepping between them when Anakin’s hand tightened around her throat in warning and she made a strangled gasp that sounded faintly of her husband’s name.

“Let her _go,_ ” Dr. Kenobi repeated slowly, Padmé barely hearing his words as she looked frantically toward Sheev who just- just _watched_. 

_What he wanted,_ she thought with a kind of vague disbelief, her mind hazy. The kick one of her children landed against her cervix felt almost as if it had happened to another person. _What-_

Behind Anakin- behind Sheev- an almost impossibly tall man stood, the edges of his form blending organically into the woodwork. He met her gaze, smirking, and a part of Padmé realized something she couldn’t even explain to herself, the words just out of her grasp. 

Her husband- ill and raving and not the same man who had been so gentle in their honeymoon suite- pulled something that gleamed silver from the waistband of his jeans. “You turned her against me,” he accused the world at large, his eyes unfocused and utterly lost. “You will _not_ take her from me.”

Starved for air, she couldn’t even muster the strength to try and catch herself when he tossed her backward, the impact of her body against the steps registering only distantly. 

_This trap closed the moment we stepped inside_ was what drifted through her mind, the words clear even as everything else softened and crumbled. The tall man took shape above her, his face almost as close as a lover’s.

“Aren’t you a treat,” he crooned in her ear as unknown hands grabbed her legs and an unfamiliar cry rose in the air. “Do you know how long I’ve tried to reach you?”

“I’m bleeding,” she heard herself mumble. “My babies.”

The hands dragged her down one step, then another, and another, until she was sliding across the floor toward what had once been her living room. Somehow the man stayed exactly above her, his thin face obscenely pleased. “My servants.”

Cloudy as her mind was, Padmé still found the will to bare her teeth in defiance. “ _My. Children._ ”

\- - -

By all rights Ben’s rush to the house should have been accomplished in a feverish haze, but instead he found his mind sharp and focused, catching even the most minute of details- the feel of his car keys in his hand, the chill of the cold autumn air, the moonlight silvering the trees. The radio in his car- tuned to the local classical station- turned on mid-Sugar Plum Fairy, an early and somewhat menacing hint at the coming holiday season. 

On the drive he found himself thinking not of his life or the fight ahead, but of Bebe: the gangly teenage cat he had adopted from the shelter, who had watched him cautiously for a solid week before deciding that he was her slave and dropping all pretense of manners. The way she curled up at his feet at night and woke him early in the morning by perching on his chest with a purr that radiated throughout his entire body. 

“A very good cat,” he murmured to himself, keeping his eyes on the empty, illuminated road. Ben loved her rather ridiculously. 

The moonlight- a friendly companion on his drive- turned treacherous when the house came into view. Each window gleamed unnaturally as he parked, and for a heart-stopping moment he saw the knife his uncle had buried in his side in every gilded line. 

“Nothing for it, then,” he muttered, hearing the terror he was doing his best not to acknowledge in his voice. He retrieved the flashlight from his glove compartment and- with a heavy sigh more felt than expressed- began to walk toward the front door. 

That it opened before his foot hit the first porch step did not surprise him. 

That it snapped shut like the trap it was the moment he was inside and clear of its path didn’t surprise him, either. 

He took a moment to consider the entry hall, remembering the day his mother had meticulously polished the hardwood while singing along to the songs on the radio… and also remembering the moment she had caught him kicking a soccer ball idly around that same hardwood nearly a week later and the blaze of distinctly unmotherly rage that had briefly lit her eyes. It had been, perhaps, the closest she had ever come to striking him in her life.

A slight presence coalesced by his side, but when he directed the beam of his flashlight to the right he just saw the barest hint of profile and curls. “Fuck off,” Ben muttered to the apparition, tensing at this first show of power.

The silhouette- female, he thought- seemed to give him a kind of long-suffering glance, and what might have been an arm gestured upward. In an instant his vision focused and rippled, the effect eerily like a film flashback, and a heavily pregnant woman with brunette curls tumbling down her back stepped apart from the apparition, lifting her right foot to place it on the first step. 

_Up,_ the ghost of his grandmother half-indicated, half-spoke, a face too like his own staring back at him. _Up, Ben._

Impossible to trust anything or anyone in this house. Even if- _when_ \- he found Rey, he would have to risk dragging an impostor past the door. Ben wasn’t quite sure how far past the boundary an impostor would last; he could only hope that whichever woman he ended up tossing over his shoulder turned out to be the same woman he had spent the last night curled around. 

Because he _would_ drag her out if she refused to come. Ben had lined his trunk with a blanket stolen from the hotel for just that purpose, and had tossed a few bottles of water and a handful of granola bars in there for good measure. Let her hate him after the fact; he’d take a fist to the face if she were so inclined.

The vision of his grandmother watched him gravely from her spot at the foot of the steps, crimson blood beginning to pool beneath her feet. _Anakin loved this house so much,_ he heard in a whisper of air. _I loved him too much to say no. Maybe I should have loved him a little less._

Ben wavered, tempted to trust her and her seemingly friendly face- because she looked kind and loving and _desperate_ in the same way his mother had looked on her own deathbed- but as he stepped toward her the house groaned with malevolent pleasure. 

And so he ran, leaving his own grandmother translucent and stricken as she lingered at the spot where she had once been betrayed. 

\- - -

Rey swore, the words dropping from her lips silently as she shook her stinging hand, droplets of blood falling to the carpet. 

A screwdriver would be handy. Or a chain-saw. Or actual _light_ instead of what the moon and judicious use of her cell phone provided. Instead she was painstakingly taking apart a portion of the bed-frame by hand, kneeling on already battered knees and working her fingertips raw as she tried to free one of the legs. She had never been less happy to be faced with well-constructed furniture in her life, though it was her only option: the closet was empty and the chest too sound to break, as she had discovered while screaming soundless obscenities and trying to obtain something, anything to use as a weapon. 

Finally she wrested a leg free, the weight of her makeshift club heavy in her hands. “Right, then,” she murmured with a forced smirk as she tucked away her phone, tired of the way the air sucked up every sound that she made. “That window has to go.”

Licking dry lips and ignoring her need for food and water, Rey prepared herself to strike. She envisioned the window shattering, red glow turned to cleansing moonlight, and with a savage grin she pulled back her weapon and _swung_.

The force of impact reverberated up her club and through her body as wood met glass, and she stumbled back in disbelief. Not a single crack marred the surface of the window.

Snarling she swung again, and again, and again, pain flaring in her shoulders and arms as she battered futilely at the mocking red. She would have welcomed sound, at that moment- it might have felt like she was actually making some kind of progress if she could hear the crash and ring. 

“What a feral beast you are.”

Not only the first words she had heard in hours, but the first sound, period. Rey swung around, breathing heavily and shaking out her left arm. There was no one behind her, no one anywhere in the room. 

“Everyone has something they want,” the sibilant voice continued, seeming to wrap around her like cobwebs. “Everyone. Wealth, power, influence. You… you want belonging, don’t you? You’re tired of digging through refuse and begging for bits of attention.”

She cleared her throat, eyes darting around for the source of the voice, and heard herself for the first time since the door had slammed shut. “Go away.”

The red glow grew to actual light, easing dark shadows and revealing- inexplicably- a furnished room. The bed was once more in one piece, topped by a mattress and made up with crisp linens. To one side she saw a small table and two comfortable chairs; to another a large dresser. 

And alongside the bed, barely in view, a cradle rested.

“Stay,” the voice said. “I’ll give you a family, little foundling. The man downstairs could be yours to keep.” The voice turned sly, almost caressing. “He came to save you. You could save him.”

Ben. Of course Ben had come. Rey’s hand tightened around her club and in one swift move swung her weapon toward a lamp that moments beforehand simply hadn’t existed at all. She made contact, the lamp smashing onto the floor in shivering pieces of porcelain. “You just want me to save _you,_ ” Rey spat. “Your time is over.”

The light ebbed until she once again stood in a barely illuminated room, and when the voice resumed it seemed to whisper directly in her ear. “Do you think he’s untouched by his time here? Untainted?”

Its amusement was a dark and angry thing, and she had to repress a shiver. “Do you think I didn’t carve a little place in his mind just for me?” the house continued, a slight pressure dropping onto her shoulders. “I knew he would return to me one day, in this house where his family has shed so much blood.”

The pressure- like long, thin hands, she realized- tightened unbearably, and she dropped her club with a strained gasp. “And now he’ll shed yours,” the house hissed. “You’ll fall by his hand if you choose not to serve. I have not stood for so many years to be destroyed by one pesky scavenger.”

“You’ve had more than a century,” Rey replied in a low voice, trying to struggle free of its hold. “Surely that’s enough for anyone.”

“For some.” The house exhaled, something she both heard and felt as the floor rippled under her feet and walls flexed. “Not for all.”

And then the room was just a room, and when she breathed she heard her own breath in the still air. Heard the swish of carpet under her feet when she shifted, the rustle of wind through the trees outside, and- louder than it should have been- the click of the door unlocking. 

Rey bent to retrieve her club, wincing at her collection of aches and the way a part of her mind whined for water. So she was allowed out, was she? No longer caged like a prisoner, but set loose to… to run into some other kind of trap, most likely. 

“Well,” she whispered, the word dropping into the stillness like a pebble into a pond. “Well.”

She placed her hand on the doorknob, a thought running insistently through her head.

_This is not going to go the way you think._

Whether that was a warning for herself or the house she wasn’t quite sure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anakin's dialogue is almost entirely lifted from the climactic scene in _Revenge of the Sith._


	11. labyrinth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another Spooky Sunday is upon us! I've been watching the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House this weekend and I think it is phenomenal. 15 out of 10, would get caught out by a jump scare again. 
> 
> TW in the opening flashback for suicide.

It happened like this: Padmé hung onto consciousness by tooth and nail even as her surroundings turned a soft watercolor. 

“Why?” she managed to ask the woman who had dragged her away from the hall, unable to remember her name and not caring. “Why?”

The other woman paused, still kneeling by Padmé’s side. One long red braid hung over her shoulder, the color almost as bright as the blood staining the knees of her jeans. “I don’t remember,” she admitted softly, her gaze turning distant. “I feel… I feel so _odd,_ here.”

Cold fingers trailed across Padmé’s forehead, the sensation making her flesh crawl. “Not everyone is as stubborn as you,” the thin man said in a sibilant whisper. “Some people are very, very open.”

The other woman was staring just above Padmé’s head, her expression that of sick fascination. “I just wanted to hide from my ex,” she said, almost pleading. “A fresh start.”

Pain twisted Padmé’s belly, and she repressed a whimper even as her hands curled into fists, fingernails biting into her palms.

“Blood,” the man continued, his tone amused and almost thoughtful. “My father raised me to revere bloodlines. Then, as a surgeon, I learned how devastating the loss of blood can be to the human body.” His arm moved just at the edge of her increasingly blurry vision, and after a second he raised a hand in front of her face. Blood- her own blood- gleamed crimson on his fingertips. “Now I know how blood can bind someone to a place.”

As if hypnotized the woman pulled a pocket knife from her jeans and flipped open the blade. 

“I would have let you live, but you tried to take what belongs to me,” the man crooned, and Padmé understood: this was a lesson, and an unnecessarily cruel one. “Everything in this house belongs to me.”

The woman dragged the blade tortuously slow up one arm, not a single sound emitting from her lips. Another burst of pain wracked Padmé’s abdomen. 

“They’re mine, not yours,” Padmé managed to retort, her voice thready.

“They were created in my domain. They belong to me.”

Blood streamed down one arm as the woman repeated the process on the second, and Padmé realized that she really did want to know her name, her story. She looked so hopeless and so very, very young as she knelt on the floor, blood pattering to the hardwood to mingle with Padmé’s own.

“I look forward to watching you walk these halls with me.” The man patted her shoulder in a way that might have been comforting from anyone else but was simply foreboding from him. “Unable to touch your children as they toddle through my home.”

Her mind spun, and when she finally spoke she asked a question that she hadn’t even realized she needed answered. “Who are you?”

He leaned over her until his face was all she could see. “Why, Edward Snoke, my dear.” His smile was thin and unnaturally wide. “Charmed.”

\- - -

Ben left the shade behind him at a run, but he had barely rounded one corner before he slowed. 

_Running from a ghost,_ he thought with a grimace, stopping in his tracks entirely. Steeling his nerves, he peered back into the entry hall. 

Empty. His flashlight beam revealed no one, living or dead, and he briefly wondered if he had made a mistake- but then, he wasn’t entirely sure if _anyone_ could be considered trustworthy in this house, including himself. Could he be sure that he was even on the ground floor? Maybe his feet had traveled to the basement, or to an upper story, and his eyes were seeing only what the house wanted him to see. 

_Ben, put down that book and help me._

Slowly, he turned away from the entry hall to shine his light toward the kitchen, half-expecting to see his mother standing in the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. Again, empty air greeted him. Cautiously he took a step forward, and then another, and then another. All he could see was the arch of the empty door-frame and the dull reflection of the tile his mother had chosen fifteen years before. 

_Hey, Kid, could you grab something from the Falcon for me?_

There were two explanations, Ben decided as he stopped once more. Either his own memories were too strong here- and really, that wouldn’t be surprising- or the house was using his own parents’ voices against him, searching for any chink in his armor. 

The brush of sound to his right drew his startled attention, and when the beam of his flashlight settled on the door to the great room he found himself face to face with Rose Tico. 

Or, at the very least, Rose Tico’s body. What met his gaze wasn’t quite her and wasn’t quite the house, but something in between- something that almost brought him to mind of an ancient oracle. 

“Are you going to look?”

Behind her was only darkness, but he suspected that the hole from the picture lay somewhere beyond. The southern part of the house, Rey had said just a week or so ago, and while he had no sense of cardinal directions at that moment it made a certain amount of sense that a possessed woman would stand between him and what may or may not be his goal. 

Still. “Look at what?” he asked warily, and she turned to lead him forward like someone in a dream. The house, then, wanted him to see whatever was in that secret room- or at the very least wanted to lure him into a larger space. 

Unsure what else to do, Ben followed Rose cautiously, sweeping the light from corner to corner. They were alone, as best he could tell. 

He raised the beam to do another sweep, and two-thirds of the way through the pass it illuminated the crumbling hole in the opposite wall. Rose stopped in the space between, her hand wrapped around the pendant she wore. “Sometimes we build to contain, don’t we?” she asked rhetorically. “Sometimes we want to keep what refuses to be kept.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” Her voice was still so distant. “A house lives such a long time and sees so many things. A house gets bored, sometimes.” She nodded toward the hole. “Go look.”

And for whatever reason- because he felt guilty for dragging her into this mess, or because he simply had to know- he moved forward.

“He never could get a foothold in her,” Rose said as he crossed the room. “Her husband’s illness made him weak; their friend was pliable.”

Ben paused several feet from the dark hole, looking back at her. “My grandmother?”

“Imagine you live forever,” she said slowly. “Imagine having control over everything inside of you- and then one day, you don’t.”

Ben looked down, more feeling than seeing the carpet under his feet. The only carpet on the ground floor, because his mother and uncle had been unable to come to terms with the idea of refinishing the hardwood their mother had bled to death on. “The house wanted to keep my grandmother?” he asked through numb lips. 

“By choice, or by force.” She took a step closer. “Stubborn.” Rose’s gaze drifted to her right and an odd smile quirked her mouth. “Weren’t you?”

Ben saw only the barest outline of curls among the shadows, just enough to know that a third presence had joined them in the room. _Ask about her sister._

“Her sister?” he asked quietly, and Rose’s forehead lightly furrowed. 

_Paige._

He considered Rose’s face in the white light, and after a moment said, “Where’s Paige, Rose?”

Her expression turned distinctly stricken as her hand clenched tighter around the pendant. “Paige?”

Ben could barely hear her, but she looked more awake in that moment than she had since her appearance. “Paige.”

Rose blinked, her hand dropping from the pendant. She took in a quick breath, realization flooding her face with a suddenty that couldn’t be faked. “We’re in the house,” she said in a horrified whisper. “After dark. We’re in the house, after dark, and things are… wrong.”

“That’s a pretty good summary, yeah,” he muttered, feeling incredibly exposed but knowing that Rey would want him to do whatever he could to get Rose out of the building. “We’re going to the front door, okay?” he continued in a low voice, taking a step toward her in the most nonthreatening way he could manage in an entirely threatening situation. “You can wait in my car while I find everyone else.”

Her gaze shifted behind him. “What happened to the wall?”

“I don’t know.”

They both looked toward the hole, Ben glancing over the spot where his grandmother had been.

“I don’t…” Rose began, then licked her lips in a nervous gesture, looking as if she were trying to piece together a puzzle without all of the clues. Her hands, though, clenched into fists. “Where’s Rey?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said again.

“Because Rey should be here. Rey never asks us to do anything she wouldn’t do herself.” 

Ben felt his mouth twitch up in a slight smile, because _of course_. “I know.”

She stepped forward, snatching the flashlight from his hand. “And my boys. I need my boys; we agreed to try for a baby next summer,” she continued, words spilling from her mouth in a rapid stream. “Have you seen them?” 

Rose looked truly fierce, at that moment, and he sensed that a great deal hung on his next words. “You are the first person I’ve seen since I walked in,” he replied firmly, which was truthful in a certain sense. “Someone texted me a picture of that damn hole, and I knew… I knew that Rey needed my help.”

In the uneven light she stared at him for a long moment, her shoulders raised slightly in a way that spoke of tension. “This is the weirdest fucking house,” she finally muttered, and took the final steps to the hole, light aimed straight ahead. 

There was nothing for it. He stepped up behind her, peering over her shoulder into the abyss.

A rocking chair. A small table. A lamp. An iron bed-frame, covered with a sagging mattress.

“Oh,” Rose breathed, the sound barely audible over the frantic beat of his heart. 

“‘Sometimes we build to contain’,” he quoted quietly, ignoring her questioning look. “It never got a chance to trap her… not physically, at least.”

Rose moved the beam a little to the left, illuminating what looked like a ventilation grate. Too small to escape through, but large enough to pass food, water, maybe even a bucket. “God.”

Carefully, gently, he wrapped his hand around her wrist, pulling until she lowered the flashlight to the floor and left the hidden cell in shadow.

_Like it belongs,_ he thought with a shiver. _Empty and unused and dark._

“Come on.” He took the flashlight from her and she relinquished it without complaint, though she looked at him with an odd mix of sympathy and wariness. “You’re going to wait in my car, okay? I’ll get the others out.”

“Fuck that,” she shot back, expression shifting to outrage. “If you think-”

A crash several floors above stopped her mid-sentence, and without another word they turned and sprinted toward the stairs.

\- - -

For the briefest of moments Rey thought she saw Ben out of the corner of her eye when she stepped out of the master bedroom, but when she turned to her right she was confronted instead by a wraith. 

_Leave._

For a moment she just stared up at him, instinctively knowing his identity, and the thought that ran through her mind was a sad _he’s even younger than Ben._ Not by much- a year, maybe two- but enough. “I have to find everyone else.”

_Getting everyone out would be impossible._ He bent toward her just a little, a lock of hair falling over his face in a way that reminded her of his grandson. _You don’t want to stay here forever._

“Eventually this place will fall into ruin,” she replied quietly. “The signs are already here.”

_That’s why it wants you. That’s why it wants him. Someone to polish the floors, to patch the roof, to keep the pipes from bursting. Someone to torment._

“Maybe he shouldn’t have bound himself to a building, then, if that’s what it wants.”

The pronouns, she thought a little absently, were a mess with this place. Rey hefted her club, ignoring the way the muscles in that arm protested the action. “Do you know where they are?” she asked at normal volume, deciding that it hardly mattered how softly or loudly she spoke. The house surely knew _exactly_ where she was, and luring the others out was her intention. “Tell me.”

He looked up, and a second later she heard the dull sound of footsteps at a run from the floor above- and so she ran, because by God no fucking house was ever going to stand between her and what family she had managed to patch together. In her other hand she held out her phone, aiming what light it could offer ahead.

On the way up the stairs she swung her club at a light fixture, all glass and delicate brass-

_Removed five days ago and packed away in bubble wrap._

-and it shattered in one blow, shards of glass raining down to the stair-treads. She took out another light, and then a framed portrait she had never seen before, and as she kept running toward the source of the footsteps-

_They keep running ahead why do they keep running ahead?_

-carpet disappeared from under her feet and turned to wood, and she knew that if the lights actually worked she would be seeing the house as it had been when it was newly built. It had been a showpiece, once, and that’s what the house wanted, wasn’t it? To gleam and trap and suck away the life of everyone who had the misfortune of stepping inside, and maybe that wasn’t what Snoke had been intending when he had bound himself to the wood and plaster and glass but by God that was what he had gotten. 

Another swing of her weapon knocked a landscape off of the wall, the frame cracking on impact. She stepped from wood to a rug and laughed humorlessly as her phone showed her a glimpse of intricate red and gold weave. Ahead a shadow disappeared around a corner as she yelled “Stop! Just stop!”

Down another hall and then up the servants’ stairs, and down another hall, and another, and had there always been so many halls? Had there always been so many twists and turns, or had the house created this labyrinth just for her?

And then she burst into the attic and stopped, the glow of her phone illuminating Poe. 

“Have you seen Rosie?”

Rey had only heard Poe address Rose by that diminutive a handful of times, and it had always been just at the edge of her hearing, as if it were an endearment meant only for the most private of moments. “Not since you locked me in the master bedroom this morning,” she answered with more composure than she felt. “Are you okay?”

He seemed to consider that question very seriously. “I don’t think so,” he said finally, the barest hint of self-awareness in his voice. “I’ve been looking for them for hours. Sometimes I think that I can hear them calling my name, but… but sound travels strangely, here.” Poe pulled something from his pocket. “Found this, though. Finn will be looking for it.”

She caught a glimpse of the silver multi-tool and nodded. “He loves that thing,” she agreed, watching as Poe fiddled with it. If he unfurled a blade-

But no. He was handing it to her, and she tucked her club under one arm to accept it. “Give it to him for me,” Poe said with some of his usual charm, the sound odd and out of place in their surroundings. “If you find him.”

“When _we_ find him,” she replied stubbornly, tucking the tool into her pocket. “Come on; we need to get downstairs.”

Poe shifted his feet, turning as if headed for the stairs on the opposite side of the cavernous room. In between lay a maze of shrouded and impossible furniture, including one tall shape that drew Rey’s eye despite the dark. 

“Nope,” she said quickly, dropping her club in favor of reaching out and grabbing one of his belt loops. “Come on; we’re taking the back stairs.”

There came a creak and a groan akin to a cracking tree, and amidst the shadows Rey saw what had to be the wardrobe topple and come crashing to the floor, reverberations from the impact traveling under their feet. “Come on,” she said again, throat tight, and tugged at him. “We’re leaving.”

And the steps went down, and down, and down, and down, and down, and Rey thought with rising panic as she pulled a remarkably placid Poe after her that _it has me, it has me, it’s showing me only what it wants me to see, any minute now we’ll both be jumping out of a third story window, and-_

A breeze like someone moving quickly passed her on the steps, forcing her to pause as she was struck by the slightest scent of Ben’s soap, and then she was no longer on the stairs but in the entry hall. 

“Rey?”

“Finn.”

Finn wasn’t looking at her but at Poe, and there was so much relief and love in his face that Rey made an impulsive decision. She shoved Poe toward Finn, giving them her best _what I say goes_ expression as she pointed toward the front door. “Out,” she snapped. “Wait with the trucks. Call the police. _Stay outside._ ”

Finn looked ready to argue, and even Poe seemed to shake himself awake at that moment. “Not without Rose,” Poe said as he straightened to his full height, glaring at her. “Not-”

The front door opened easily under Rey’s hand, the first slap of cold wind giving her the added strength to snarl at both of them. “Get out of this fucking house. I will find Rose, and I will find Ben, and I will do it without worrying that one of you will turn puppet again and try to hamstring me.”

They both looked shaken at that, as if they had only just remembered or realized what, exactly, they had done that very morning. “Rey,” Finn began, true horror in his voice, and she cut him off with a shake of her head. 

“Please,” she said, and even to her ears she sounded almost as if she were begging. “ _Please._ ”

They exchanged a look before reluctantly stepping over the threshold, and as neatly as that Rey stood divided from them. “If we don’t get out set this place on fire,” she said with finality, and the door swung shut of its own accord. 

Alone once more, Rey turned back to the stairs. No friends or ghosts to point the way, but there was the memory of Ben’s scent... 

She would follow that.

\- - -

“There.”

Ben swung the flashlight in the direction Rose indicated, frowning at the sight of an innocuous closed door. Just another guest room on the third floor, nothing at all remarkable about it. “Why that one?”

“Because of the light.” Her hand was once more wrapped around her pendant, but she looked so very present that he had no fear that she had slipped away. “The light is on.”

He shifted his own beam of light away and drew in a ragged breath when he saw that she was right: a glow limned the door, as if a lamp burned warmly inside. “I really hate this place.”

“Yeah, I’m feeling the same way.” 

She didn’t make a move toward the door, and neither did he: for the moment the air stood still and quiet around them, and he felt as if even twitching a finger would attract undue attention. Then he heard a sound like a sigh and stepped forward without thought, hand closing around the doorknob. 

An auburn-haired woman knelt on the floor of the room, hands pressed against the intricately patterned red rug. How she had died was clear to see, but she stood at their arrival like her life’s blood hadn’t streamed from her veins. _I slept in this room,_ she told them without even a hint of surprise at their appearance, moving toward a bedside table where she picked up a slim book. _I thought I had found the perfect solution, the perfect place to run._

“Who…?” Rose asked in an undertone, and he shook his head with a bewildered shrug. 

_I kept dreaming of blood, though._ She set the book down on the bed, looking around the room. _Blood in the foundation, in the walls, in the water. And then I bled out on the floor, and now I just walk and walk and walk._

The red of the carpet seemed to spread before Ben’s eyes, creeping steadily across the hardwood and up the walls as the stranger watched with a detached air. _Nothing in this house is as it should be,_ she said. _Nothing._

\- - -

The master bedroom’s red light spilled into the hallway, and Rey knew.

“There,” she murmured to herself, taking slow steps down the hall. Her phone dropped unheeded from her hand to the carpet, screen black and battery drained. “There.”

The room appeared unchanged when she stepped to the open door, toes barely brushing the threshold. The chest was still shoved in one corner, the bed still partially dismantled. A tall figure, though, stood in front of the window, unnaturally thin and balding.

_Snoke and his precious window,_ she thought with a sudden flash of bitterness, one hand sneaking into her pocket and pulling out skin-warmed metal. Without looking she flipped open the longest blade, mouth firming into a straight line. Was it murder, to stab a ghost? Would it even do any good?

And Rey decided, _who cares?_

She rushed in.

\- - -

Red. Red walls, red light, and one red window inches from his nose.

_Mother fucker,_ he thought with resigned irritation. “Rose-”

But Rose shouted something incoherent in panicked tones, and he whirled around to see shadows that abruptly resolved into _Rey_ arrowing toward him, something flashing in her hand. _A woman spilled your guts on the fucking carpet_ he heard his cousin say as he dodged, hands reaching out to snare Rey’s shoulders. 

The first time he missed, Rey moving with a quickness and ferocity that caught him even more off guard than he was. She swung the small blade down like a sword, and though she barely caught him with the tip she still managed to mark him from forehead to chest.

_Thank God she missed my eye,_ he thought in shock as she whirled away and gathered herself for another assault. 

His second, desperate attempt was successful. Rey rocketed into his hold with a surprised gasp, the knife in her hand missing his side by inches and plunging into the window. 

The house screamed. There was no other word for the noise or the furious tremor under their feet, and it was so loud that Ben briefly wondered if the residents of Mustafar were jarred from their sleep, weary heads turning in the direction of the abandoned house on the hill. 

“Ben?” Rey whispered, her body trembling against his. 

“Hey, sweetheart,” he whispered in return, brushing a bloody kiss over her forehead. 

“I-”

“I know,” he murmured soothingly, gentling his grip. “I know.”

She took a step back, her face showing suspicion warring with guilt. “How do… how do I know you’re you?”

A valid question, in this house. Remembering her words just twenty-four hours before, he released her shoulders and lifted one hand between them, blood dripping down his face. “Pinky swear.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies, Mara Jade.


	12. spiral

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another spooky Sunday is upon us! Thank you so much for all your comments, kudos, and bookmarks- y'all give me life. 
> 
> My plan at this point is to post one more regular chapter next Sunday, and an epilogue that I hope will go up on Halloween. Fingers crossed that the muse and real life both oblige!

It happened like this: Padmé lost consciousness and never woke up again.

Or, at the very least, she never woke up in her actual body. 

A blessing, she decided as she watched Sheev slice open her belly and lift out her children one by one, finding it in herself to be grateful that he carefully wiped away the fluid from their nostrils and mouths before wrapping them up warm. His hands were already covered with someone else’s blood- maybe her unfortunate doctor’s, or maybe even Anakin’s- but that was such a small thing under the circumstances.

His two friends-

 _No,_ she thought with a shake of her head, remembering poor… poor _Mara,_ that had been her name. _Victims._

Just like he was a victim, and her own husband was a victim. Neither of them would have ever lifted an unkind hand to anyone, before this house. She knew that to the bones that were no longer hers.

A hand curved tentatively over her shoulder. “Padmé.”

She didn’t look back at Anakin, though she did think _caught after all_ as she hopelessly watched their daughter and son voice their discontent. “I wish…”

He responded in a low, mournful tone, sounding once more like the man she had married. “I know.” 

His arms wrapped around her from behind, his chin coming to rest on the top of her head. Gone was the comforting weight of his living form; in its place was only a wisp of the real thing. “All we did was buy a house,” Padmé whispered as she watched another woman cradle her daughter. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No, we didn’t.” 

In a just world they both would have lived, healthy and whole, to raise their children and maybe even make a few more. Even in a less just world she should have been able to flee to the city she knew best with the twins safe in her womb. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and she missed the way his breath would have stirred her hair in life. “I failed you.”

“No,” she replied, her voice firming. “You aren’t to blame for this. There’s nothing you could have done to fight a tumor.”

“You aren’t to blame for this either.” 

She blinked back tears, a phenomenon that she wouldn’t have expected in death. “I invited them in.”

“You needed the help.” He pressed a kiss to her hair, the action barely felt. “There’s no blame in that.”

Their son grizzled in Sheev’s arms, waving a tiny fist half-heartedly in the air. “They can’t stay here,” Padmé insisted hopelessly, clasping one hand over Anakin’s forearm. “Not with them, not with… _him._ ”

“No.” That same hopeless note was in Anakin’s voice. “No, they can’t.”

\- - -

“Pinky swear.”

Two words were enough to make her stiff muscles loosen, the knife slipping from her hand to clatter to the floor. “ _Ben._ ” She spoke his name in a whisper, the tone far closer to horror than relief. 

He blinked at her through steadily dripping blood, his dark sweater barely showing the spreading stain. Then he moved a little, just shifting his weight, and pale, bloody skin peeked out through torn fabric. “Are you going to follow through or not?” he asked, a tinge of humor in his voice as he continued to hold one hand between them, pinky finger extended. 

With a choked laugh she twined her little finger with his, lifting her free hand to dash away the tears on her cheeks. “I’m so _sorry._ I thought you were… I thought you were him.”

He raised a brow, somehow managing to look self-possessed and concerned for _her_ even as he continued to bleed. Rey knew from experience that minor facial wounds bled a terrifying amount of blood, but it was rather different seeing the phenomenon on Ben instead of her own face. “Which him?” he asked, and there, in his voice: clear evidence of his own nerves.

“The house,” she replied, unwilling to speak the name aloud. 

“You saw him?”

Rey stood a little straighter, looking away from Ben to her right. “Rose?”

How had she missed Rose?

“Never seen you move that fast,” the other woman said with a weak laugh. “Not even around food.” Rose wrapped one hand around her pendant, a nervous gesture Rey recognized. “I don’t remember what happened this morning- or today, really,” she amended, brow creasing, “but I think I owe you an apology.”

Rey had nursed a few bitter fantasies as the day had gone along- the desire for revenge was its own kind of food- but she immediately put aside every biting speech she had concocted. They would have to work together to get out of this house, and what good would it do, really? Why punish Rose- or Finn, or Poe- when something else had used their hands to injure her?

“You weren’t yourselves,” Rey said with a shake of her head. “No apologies needed.”

As she spoke Ben closed the slight gap between them, his hand curving around the back of her head. Biting her bottom lip, she avoided his eyes, peering instead at the cut on his chest through the rent in his sweater. “I hope you’re up to date on your tetanus shot,” she told him, trying not to let her voice waver. 

“Luckily, yes.” A pause. “I’m getting blood on you.”

“I don’t care.”

And she didn’t, not really- his state was her fault, after all. 

“Have you seen my boys?” Rose asked, and with relief Rey shoved aside her guilt to focus on her one bit of good news. Rose glanced down at the floor and raised a brow. “Is that Finn’s knife?”

“It is, and they’re out of the house.” Rey stepped away from Ben, stooping to gather the multi-tool from the floor. Carefully she wiped Ben’s blood from the blade before folding the attachment home. “Unhurt, as best I could tell.”

The tension in Rose’s face eased, her murmured “Thank God” barely audible. “Okay, then,” she continued after taking in a deep breath, her hand dropping away from the pendant. “Okay.”

A creak like the house settling caught their attention, reminding Rey that their work was far from done. Before she could do more than glance toward the exit the door slammed shut, lock clicking into place.

“You’re the professionals,” Ben said as he did his best to blot blood from his face with one sleeve, the undeserved tenderness he had been directing toward her replaced by wariness. “Best way to quickly wreck a house?”

The pipes in the walls seemed to hiss at his words. Impossible to plan properly when they were literally trapped inside their very enemy. Scowling, Rey searched for something, anything she could do to wound their captor.

Catching sight of the minor damage she had dealt to the window, she looked toward Rose to see if she might be carrying anything useful. A satisfied smile crept onto Rey’s face when she spotted what hung from her friend’s tool belt. “May I borrow your hammer?” she asked Rose, sending up silent thanks to any entity that might be listening that the tool had never used as a weapon. In one quick move Rey flipped open the blade on the multi-tool again. 

Rose caught on immediately, eyes gleaming with vengeful amusement. “Of course.”

“Move back, please,” Rey told Ben, who did so with alacrity as she slotted the knife back into the hole in the glass. On close inspection the blade hadn’t hilted to its full extent, which should work in her favor. “I doubt the manufacturers of this tool expected anyone to use it as a chisel,” she said as she lined up her hammer. “But desperate times, you know.”

The tool held when she gave it the first strike of the hammer, and as a crack marred the surface of the window the pipes growled. 

A second strike created a web of cracks in all directions, the casing of the tool seeming to loosen in her hand. She had one strike, she realized, maybe two before the damn thing fell apart.

On the third strike the blade slid in to the hilt, glass shattering with inexplicable force. Rey threw herself backward, tools dropping from her hands, and by sheer luck managed to avoid being sliced by the majority of the glass. Her only significant injury seemed to be on her upper arm, where slicing pain flared. “Everyone all right?” she demanded, taking stock of her companions. 

She ignored the roar of the pipes, the slamming of doors, the shriek of rippling wood under their feet. Let the house throw its tantrum; she had better things to attend to.

A small cut scored Rose’s cheek, but in the flood of silvery moonlight Rey saw no other sign of damage on either of them. Ben didn’t bother replying, his attention bent on her new wounds. “You have glass in your hair,” he said in a low voice that promised unspecified vengeance. “Sweetheart-”

_Follow me._

Their living trio froze, Ben’s hand hovering over her hair with a sliver of glass in his fingers. The distinct figure of a woman with curly hair had appeared in their midst, something that looked like hope in her eyes. _They can only distract him for so long._

Rey laid a hand lightly against Ben’s side, seeing the link between man and ghost with barely a conscious thought. _They would have loved him,_ she thought as she stared into his grandmother’s eyes. _They do love him._

In the moonlight, unobscured by red glass, Padmé Skywalker looked almost alive. _So many ghosts,_ she said, humor that was _almost_ malicious twinkling in her eyes. _Maybe more than he can handle._

She walked away toward the closet, and after a moment of hesitation Rey trailed after her. “But-”

_Me, my husband, Mara, the workers from construction and various tenants since…_

Padmé seemed to wilt, just a little. _My-_

She stopped, then pressed one hand against the back wall of the closet, her expression one of entreaty. _You need to go._

Rey hesitated, sure that Padmé was leaving out something important, but Rose stepped around her before she could speak. “We never found this passageway,” Rey heard her mutter, “but this place is so fucking ridiculous I’m not surprised.”

Rose overlaid her hand on Padmé’s, looking as if she exchanged a bolstering look with the ghost. She must have found some kind of trigger, because the back wall slid aside with a barely audible _click._

 _Paige says ‘courage’._ Padmé smiled directly at Rose. _Go._

She disappeared, and above them- in the attic, perhaps- they heard the cacophonous sound of heedless destruction. 

“They’re all up there,” Rey whispered in realization, taking Ben’s hand. “Ben-”

“I know.” 

Ahead of them Rose had turned her blessedly functional torch onto the dark void of the passage. Dusty, cobwebby steps greeted them, the tread slanting steeply downward. 

“Watch out for spiders,” Rose said with resignation, and led their party into the walls. 

\- - - 

As a teenager he had entered the basement exactly twice: once out of curiosity- a mistake; things had _skittered_ \- and once under protest. 

Now he was back, and this was no area of the basement that he was familiar with.

“Hey,” Rose said softly, aiming the beam of her flashlight upward. The three of them briefly paused to look, and at the sight of several very sturdy padlocks on the underside of a trapdoor Ben had an unhappy realization. The room. 

“What was in it?” Rey asked quietly, and he shook his head, unable to speak the words into existence. 

The basement, as he remembered it, had seemed to almost spiral outward from the staircase to the main floor, and he kept that in mind as they followed a path that curved inward and inward. They passed what appeared to be a fully stocked wine cellar (a lie, he knew, or maybe the _lack_ of a wine cellar had been a lie fifteen years before) and enough shelves stocked with ancient preserves to feed a veritable army. 

“Maybe they lost,” Rose finally said after they passed an entire shelving unit of jams. “This wasn’t here before, I swear.”

“I think this is a party trick for him- it,” Rey replied, and he wondered if she really believed that or if she were trying for reassurance. “Illusions are probably easiest, right? Not as hard as possessing-”

She stopped, clipping the word off abruptly, and Rose gave a short, awkward laugh. 

“Possessing gullible humans? That probably is harder.” Rose slowed, glancing over her shoulder at them. “I really am sorry,” she added. “I should… I should have tried harder to hear Paige.”

Rey reached forward, touching Rose’s shoulder gently. “I should have tried harder, too. I should have talked with you outside of this place- with all of you. I should have fought Holdo on her decision to uphold the contract.”

“About that.” He caught a glimpse of Rose’s skin flushing pink before she looked forward, picking up her pace. “I think… I have vague memories of maybe calling Holdo about the two of you.”

Rey shrugged, looking not at all surprised when Ben glanced her way. “You wouldn’t have normally. It doesn’t matter.”

“I-”

Whatever Rose had to say was lost when the house shuddered around them, and from behind came the sound of a multitude of glass jars crashing to the floor. On instinct they all bolted forward in headlong flight, following the loosely constructed path. Another burst of shattering glass behind them, and another, and he realized with dawning horror that they were being herded.

The house, it seemed, was no longer interested in being pestered by its own ghosts.

Collapsing shelves urged them further and further on, the damage moving faster and faster until it was almost at their heels. Glass sprayed from what had been an assortment of pickled vegetables, and the part of Ben’s mind still capable of detached thought realized that he would never be able to get all the bits of glass from this set of clothing; that he would do better to throw away every stitch of fabric on his body.

The stairs to the first floor appeared, and as they passed through the final gauntlet Rose, who was several steps ahead, stumbled and coughed. The _why_ struck Ben a second later as the first whiff of gas made his head spin. 

“Go, go, go, _go_ ,” Rey snarled, planting her hands at the center of his back and _shoving_ when his own steps slowed. “Out. _Up._ ”

The shove cleared his mind just enough. Reaching back, he snagged Rey’s wrist and pulled her after him, grabbing Rose by the arm as he caught up with her. 

The door, at first, refused to budge, and he had the terrible thought that they were going to die at the top of the stairs, gasping poisoned air like fish out of water. He slammed his side into the door, hoping to break the lock, and began to repeat the action when it barely budged. 

The door flew open of its own accord before he could hit it again, sending all three of them tumbling into the kitchen. Ben dragged in his first untainted breath, pulling himself laboriously to hands and knees and then to his feet. 

“I hate this mother-fucking house,” Rose hissed, using a counter to lever herself up. “Every damn inch of it.”

He would drink to that, later. Much later. 

The ghost of his grandfather watched them as they ran out of the kitchen, Ben catching sight of him for only a second before he was gone. Another ghost lingered in the hall, her long skirt sweeping the floor in a manner befitting fashion over a hundred years past. Another, and another, and another, his mind refusing to keep count of everyone who had been trapped within the same walls that wanted him dead or thoroughly possessed. 

They stopped abruptly in the lit entry hall, just past the spirit of the auburn-haired woman. Behind them Ben sensed a gathering of ghosts, every wraith poised at their backs.

Ahead stood a single spirit, and he loomed with a malevolence Ben felt to his very marrow. Rey’s cold fingers wove through his until their hands were pressed palm to palm.

 _Well_.

Other ghosts were a whisper. He was a shout, in comparison: in presence and in voice, the words filling every corner of the large room. The entire derailment of Ben’s childhood came down to this one man who had traded bones for walls and blood for wiring. His skin was the tattered wallpaper, his breath every hint of gas spilling into the air. 

_Children,_ he said, sounding remarkably like a patient father confronting erstwhile offspring. _You don’t have to die like this._

As if their death were a foregone conclusion, and maybe it was. Maybe they had reached the closing of a circle, maybe Ben had only temporarily avoided his intended fate fifteen years before, maybe-

 _Walk upstairs,_ Snoke said in coaxing tones, seeming to grow even more in height. _Find your rooms. You’re tired, aren’t you?_

Words- angry, bitter ones- formed in Ben’s mind, but they seemed to stick in his throat. Beside him Rey managed a tight, furious whine, as if she too were struck into unwilling silence. 

_You belong here._ Snoke moved forward with the grace of a predator, every step sure. One long-fingered hand reached out, ice-cold fingertips landing lightly on the side of Ben’s bloody face- and try as he might, Ben couldn’t move a single muscle. _Your entire bloodline belongs to me,_ Snoke whispered, lowering his face until they were mere inches apart. _I’m more a part of you than you want to admit, boy. Remember when you first stepped inside this house? It called to you, didn’t it?_

It had called to him in the same way that a train wreck drew the eye: dark, morbid fascination that had slowly and then quickly turned to terror. 

_And if I can’t have you, I’ll end your family where you stand,_ Snoke promised in a hiss. _I don’t keep what won’t bend to me._

Perhaps Snoke had lost his grip on the others, or perhaps he simply didn’t _care_ , but in one wrenching movement Rey snatched her hand away and stepped between the two of them.

“Back. Up,” she snarled, each word sharp. “ _Now._ ”

Snoke simply smirked in reply before slamming her out of his way, holding Ben’s gaze as Rey skidded across the floor on her back. 

Fury filled Ben, and it proved more useful than will. With an angry shout he lunged forward, hands reaching for Snoke’s neck- and then he stumbled in open air, feeling no more than a flash of cold for his efforts when he passed through where Snoke had been. 

“Ben!”

He swung around at Rey’s shout, stumbling again as an invisible fist caught him on the side. He caught a glimpse of Rose helping Rey to her feet as another blow grazed his shoulder. A third blow- straight to his solar plexus- made him crumble forward. When he was next able to take in a painful breath he smelled the scent of gas- fainter than in the basement, but clearly creeping its way up. 

When a fourth blow never came, he forced himself to stand and survey the room, and what he saw made his heart stutter. 

A single ghost stood between him and Snoke, and one that had no business being inside the house. 

Luke Skywalker, after all, had died in Wisconsin five years before. 

_No._

His uncle’s voice was as Ben remembered it from _before_ the house: steady and calm, and utterly trustworthy. The crowd of ghosts stirred, the supernatural equivalent of a whisper traveling through their ranks.

And Snoke looked… uneasy.

 _One ghost too many?_ Ben found himself thinking in confusion, using Snoke’s distracted state to join Rey and Rose. Or was Luke stronger than most, simply by virtue of dying elsewhere?

 _No._ Padmé stepped forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with her son, a new solidity to her form. 

Snoke still towered over them all, but he looked, suddenly, almost spindly. Perhaps even a bit weak. _I created you_.

The strength and vitriol in his voice remained undimmed, sending a shiver down Ben’s spine. Rey grabbed ahold of his sweater, the tension created in the cloth pressing against his neck. He caught a glimpse of Rose from the corner of his eye, her stance that of someone waiting for a fight.

 _Too many of us._ Anakin rested one hand on his wife’s shoulder. _Far too many of us._

Another ghost stepped forward, and then another, and another, until a solid line of spirits stood between the living and their dead captor. Ben barely noticed the creak behind them, too intent on the danger ahead, but then he felt the cold draft of fresh air.

Rey and Rose seemed to notice it at the same time, and with barely a thought all three spun around and bolted for the open door. A furious screech followed them into the night, sound traveling through the still open door as they half-ran, half-jumped down the porch steps and veered toward the waiting vehicles.

It seemed to take Ben too long to hear the voices of Finn and Poe and to see the lights they held, but then they were _there_ and Ben was standing still, gasping for breath. The first moment he could do so he pulled Rey into his arms, feeling her reassuring warmth as he thought with disbelief _we’re out._ Poe and Finn were both embracing Rose, arms overlapping until they were a solid unit.

Still, Ben felt a tinge of dread. “It’s not done,” he murmured, lifting his head to look back toward the house. Light spilled steadily from the front door across the porch, but on the floors above the lights flickered on and off erratically. “It’s not done,” he said again, his voice gaining in volume.

“You are _not_ going back in there,” Rey snapped, stepping out of his arms to glare up at him. “We’ve done enough. The ghosts will hold him until the wrecking crew comes.”

He couldn’t help but feel that the window of opportunity was closing. Someway, somehow, the house would find a way to survive if he let this moment pass. 

Or maybe that was the lingering effect of the house working on his mind. Ben couldn’t be sure. 

“Pity we can’t torch the place,” Rose said, the words a little muffled from speaking them against Poe’s chest. 

“Well,” Poe said slowly, untangling himself from his partners, “I might have something.”

“What?” Rey asked warily, keeping her eye on Ben as if he might run for the door at any moment. “Unless you have a flamethrower in that truck-”

“Something a little less professional.” The overhead light of the truck cab seemed entirely too normal and pleasant a thing for their current location. Poe rummaged behind the driver’s seat, coming up with a plastic bag. “Anyone have a lighter?” he asked with a grin as he revealed a full bottle of amber liquid, the expression faltering when he noticed Ben’s wounds for the first time.

Finn laughed, the sound sharp and short. “Where did you get _that?_ ”

“Found it on sale two days ago,” Poe replied as he stripped away foil, his gaze trained well away from Ben’s face. “Top shelf cognac. It was _supposed_ to be a surprise.”

“It is,” Rose said dryly, and tore off the dangling strip of cloth that hung from her shirt. “Here.”

Rey relaxed, the move almost begrudging. “Where did you learn how to do that?”

“Movies.”

She snorted, but her brief spurt of levity disappeared when Ben stepped up to Poe. “I need to do it,” he told the other man seriously. “I need to be the one who ends this.”

Poe continued to stuff cloth into the neck of the bottle, but nodded. “Your house, your Molotov,” he agreed.

“Ben-”

“Rey, I have to,” Ben insisted, turning back to her as Poe finished his work. “I have to finish this, and I have to finish this _now_.”

She studied him for a long moment before dropping her hands to her sides, worry and displeasure evident. “You are _not_ allowed to die.”

“Do you want me to pinky swear?”

She scowled at him but extended her hand. “Yes, you jerk.”

Their little fingers linked, he leaned down and dropped a quick kiss on her mouth. “I’ll come back for you, sweetheart,” he murmured as he pulled back, then turned away from the sight of her stricken face to take the bottle from Poe’s hands. Rose, who had been searching through the other truck, tossed him a lighter.

The house continued to scream in impotent rage, the sound thin and strained from their spot on the grass. The front door still stood open, and continued to stay open even as he drew closer and closer, until he finally stood at the top of the porch steps and looked within.

Despite the wail that Ben could feel in his very teeth, Snoke was nowhere to be seen. He had retreated into the bones of the house, window panes rattling and floors creaking as evidence of his fury. 

Ben wanted to scream himself, but even more he wanted the house gone and every painful memory with it. Raising the lighter-

_I can’t do it, Luke. I just want that part of the floor covered up. It’s too gruesome to even consider refinishing it._

-he flicked it on, producing a weak, sputtering flame-

_Hey, Princess, can we replace that window? It gives me the creeps._

-and lit the impromptu wick.

For a moment he thought that the fabric would never catch, but then the end was alight, fire moving greedily up the fabric. As he launched the bottle toward the open door, a figure appeared just inside the threshold.

 _See you around, kid,_ his uncle said with a wink as the explosive flew through him, and the door slammed shut.


	13. unravel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About halfway through this chapter I realized two things:
> 
> 1\. It desperately needed to be two chapters.  
> 2\. This story will not be finished by Halloween.
> 
> So, see you next Sunday! There will be smut then, I promise!

It happened like this: the local police listened when Dr. Kenobi’s receptionist of ten years reported his uncharacteristic absence, and when they retraced his steps they naturally began at his last known location.

“That cursed place?” one deputy muttered when he heard the address, remembering his granny’s old stories.

His partner- a man who had snuck inside the house on a dare nearly twenty years before- paled and patted the butt of his gun.

They arrived at the house at noon, the sun blazing overhead. No one answered their knock at the door, but from within they could hear the thin wail of an infant. They hesitated, uncertain, and then one man saw the curtain in front of one of the entry hall windows flutter as if struck by a breeze. The flash of blood he saw was enough to justify emergency entry.

Later- after reinforcements arrived and arrests were made, and the tiny newborns were handed off to hastily summoned relatives- the police found a hastily dug trench in the basement. Four bodies lay in a communal grave under only two feet of dirt, each corpse lying with limbs splayed at awkward angles as if they had simply been tossed into their current resting place. 

The case sparked the grim curiosity of the entire state, the more so because the actual motive was ever found. Sheev Palpatine hung himself in his cell two days after the fact. One of his accomplices- Will Tarkin- slit his wrists within a month of the night in question. The second snapped into a catatonic state and never spoke again. Burgeoning cult, the public decided, and that became the prevailing theory on the matter. 

And even after their bodies were properly buried near Charleston, Padmé and Anakin found themselves stuck within the walls of the house. 

“At least they got out,” she sighed into his shoulder as days passed, then weeks, then months, then years. Dust and cobwebs layered thickly over floors and furniture, her mortal conception of time shifting until time was utterly meaningless. “At least they got out.”

And then one day, as she lingered on the stairs of the entry hall, the door opened and living people spilled in. Not the first would-be tenants since her death, but the first she recognized with a mother’s instinct.

“At least they got out,” Snoke mocked from behind her, and laughed. 

\- - -

Ben barely remembered pelting away from the ensuing explosion, or the haste with which their ragtag lot moved the vehicles farther back, but he _did_ remember climbing wearily into the bed of Rey’s truck and curling up with his head on her lap. She bent over him, one hand in his hair. 

“You did it,” she said softly, the rapacious fire so loud that he could barely hear her or the sound of her stomach growling. “He’ll be ash before the night is through.”

Her jeans were covered in grit and what he thought was likely tiny glass shards, but he hardly cared at that moment. “My uncle.”

“I know.” She began to gently untangle his hair, her fingers soothing against his scalp. “Or I guessed, at least.” A pause as she patiently eased a particularly stubborn knot from his locks. “They love you very much.”

She sounded a little bit wistful, at that, and he reached up and captured her hand in his. “Sweetheart-”

“I think you freed them, don’t you?”

He turned onto his back, his head still in her lap. Rey looked solemn in the shifting illumination of the fire, specks of his own blood spotting her face. “I hope so.”

A sound like a scream rose from the house as a sudden billow of flame shot upward. Maybe the rending of beams and floors, or maybe Snoke himself. Either worked for his purposes.

“What will happen to him?” Rey asked, the question almost an idle one, as if she had reached the kind of fatigue where even the question of Snoke’s continued existence hardly mattered. “Is he free, now?”

Ben shut his eyes against the night and fire, releasing a sigh. “Maybe.”

In the distance, the first sounds of approaching emergency vehicles. 

“But really,” Ben continued wearily, “what is he without the house?”

Just a shadow, weak and puling.

\- - -

After- after police statements and being poked and prodded by paramedics, and after the house collapsed into a pile of ash and smoldering beams- they returned to the hotel. The rosy light of dawn was just beginning to gleam on the horizon when they dispersed to their separate rooms, Rose waving tiredly over Poe’s shoulder as he carried her down the hall, Finn moving slowly at his side.

 _They’ll be okay,_ Rey thought as she waited for Ben to unlock his door. Her friends’ bond was too strong to break over even the most inexplicable of phenomena, something Rey had to believe for their sake as much as for her own. She had failed to keep them safe, after all. They might not have listened if she had called a team meeting outside the bounds of the house, but she could have at least _tried_ beyond making one measly phone call to Holdo. 

“Take a shower with me,” Ben requested after the door was locked behind them. He was slumped in on himself a little, but even as tired as he was she could see a new lightness on his features. The burden of a family legacy had fallen from his shoulders, and for all of her own mistakes she couldn’t help but feel glad for him. 

His wound, though- _my handiwork,_ she thought with no little bitterness- kept her in a state of uncertainty. The scar would be on his face for the rest of his life. He would never look in the mirror without thinking of this night, or of her, or-

Rey forced herself to focus on the moment at hand. “Are you allowed to get those wet?” she asked, trying to remember what the paramedic had said about her own stitches. 

He shrugged, a brief grimace appearing on his face at the movement. “I don’t care. I need to wash that place off.”

That she understood. They stripped in an out of the way corner near the door, leaving their ruined clothing in a pile on the carpet rather than risk trailing glass throughout the rest of the suite. Averting her gaze from Ben- _I did that I did that_ \- she instead thought of the paramedic who had carefully removed every sliver of glass from her hair, and sent the woman a mental thanks.

“What happened to your knees?” Ben asked once they were under the bright bathroom lights, not seeming to notice the slight chill of the room as he stared down at her legs with a frown. 

“The house,” she replied simply, and turned on the water. 

“Did you tell the paramedics? Did you let them look at your back?”

Rey had not, and kept herself facing away from him as she answered. “It’s not that bad,” she said, sticking out a hand to test the water. 

Telling the paramedics might have just led to a simple exam and nothing more, or it might have led to x-rays and serious questions from one of the police officers on site. Rey couldn’t afford the former (she wasn’t entirely sure worker’s comp would cover her stitches; the entire situation was so irregular that she might be draining her small savings dry to pay for those herself) and she had no intention of explaining _how_ her knees had ended up so bruised to the latter. 

And the less said about how she had ended up being slammed to the floor, the better. 

“Rey-”

The water was still a little cold but she stepped under the spray anyway. “Let me wash your back,” she interrupted, picking up a washcloth and his soap. “Don’t let the water hit your stitches full-on.”

He grumbled something under his breath as he joined her, then raised his voice just enough to say, “Your hair, first. You can’t lift that arm very high.”

Not without pain, at least, and after a second of hesitation she nodded. He lathered shampoo into her hair with more care than she would have given herself, and she tried to figure out what to say.

Because something needed to be said, didn’t it?

_I’m sorry for scarring your beautiful face._

_I’m sorry that I fell for the house’s painfully obvious ploy._

_I’m sorry._

Really, she didn’t understand why she was standing with him in his shower to begin with. Everything life had taught her boiled down to one hard-learned lesson: fucking up meant being sent away, or left behind, or shut out with only the clothes on her back and a few pounds in her pocket. And now she had fucked up again, personally and professionally, and there would likely be medical bills and a firing in her future, and how long would her visa and savings extend after that?

So why was he washing her hair? What was she doing here?

“Am I hurting you?” he asked, his voice barely audible over the water.

“No.” Her throat felt painfully tight, her control frayed. To be expected, she supposed, after so much stress and sleep deprivation and very little food and water. She moved a step away to rinse out the shampoo, mind still turning over the problem standing right beside her- the problem who bent down and pressed a soft kiss to her shoulder, his hands landing lightly on her hips. The touch felt comforting in its undemanding intimacy, and almost like a promise.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out, unable to keep the words down any longer. “I never should have let them go back inside. _I_ never should have gone back inside. I should have- should have explained the situation better to Holdo, or-”

Or what? She wasn’t entirely sure herself. 

He picked up the bottle of conditioner, a crease forming between his brows as he watched her. “And gotten yourself and them fired? Would your crew even have listened if you had told them to stop working and go home?”

“Maybe.” Probably not, as stubborn as they were. Every muscle in her body seemed to ache, and she told herself that was why she was sniffing back tears. “I still should have tried; I’m probably getting fired anyway.”

“If you’re getting fired it’s because I decided money was more important than simply knocking the house down unmolested.” His hands were gentle as he worked the conditioner through her hair. “I knew _exactly_ what that place was when I signed the contract.”

She whispered her next words. “I nearly blinded you. I could have killed you.”

_Please don’t send me away._

His expression took on a stubborn cast, his mouth almost forming a pout. “But you didn’t, and if the house had played that trick on me I probably would have done the same thing.” He paused, suddenly looking uncertain. “Am I… I mean, I’ve never been very pretty to look at-”

Rey found her mood shifting quickly, temper spiking. She scowled, dropping the washcloth she still held to her feet. “If you think I’m that shallow, you need to reconsider,” she said firmly, planting her hands on her hips. “And you’re still ridiculously handsome, even after I attacked you with a fucking pocket knife.”

To her surprise he laughed quietly, shaking his head. “This is a ridiculous argument,” he informed her. “We’re too tired to be doing this now.”

Her irritation ebbed away, leaving her exhausted and unsure. He was right. He was right, but she couldn’t help but worry that he would wake up in a different frame of mind. “Ben, I…”

He kissed her softly after she trailed off, just a mere brushing of lips, and she dropped her hands to her sides as tears finally spilled down her cheeks. When he pulled her into a careful hug she came willingly, resting her head on the unmarred side of his chest. “Sweetheart, I would go into any number of haunted houses for you,” he said in a low voice. “Do you honestly think I’m going to walk away from you now?”

“Others have for less,” she mumbled against his skin.

“Idiots,” he muttered, holding her a little tighter when she swayed. “We need to finish cleaning up,” he said, his voice turning tender. “And get some sleep. Whatever else needs to be said can be discussed later.”

It was suddenly difficult to keep her eyes open, though she did her best. “Okay.”

“Will you stay with me tonight?”

He sounded a little vulnerable, at that moment, and she pressed a kiss to his shoulder in an attempt to chase the emotion away. “Yes.”

After- in the dark, tucked under his arm with his breath hot against her hair- she thought _I’m still here._

“Of course you are,” he murmured sleepily, and she honestly had no idea if she had spoken aloud or if a trace of something unearthly remained. “You’re supposed to be with me.”

\- - -

Afternoon light was slipping through the gaps in the curtains when Ben woke, but it wasn’t the light that disturbed his sleep: it was the firm, incessant knock on Rey’s door, the sound annoying even from several rooms away.

“Sweetheart,” he murmured, Rey tucked so close to his side that he couldn’t quite see her face. Even at that moment his mind seemed to think _there you are_ with a contented hum. “You have a visitor.”

Whoever they were clearly had no intention of going away, but continued to knock as if perfectly willing to do so till doomsday.

“Fuck,” Rey muttered, pulling herself from the bed in a way that told him just how stiff and sore she was. “ _Fuck._ ”

He forced himself out of bed as she walked away, biting back a groan. His wound ached, and a peek under his t-shirt told him that he had deep bruises where Snoke had attacked him. It would be a while before he could move without pain, but all in all he couldn’t help but feel that he had gotten off lighter than Rey. Whether or not he could convince her of that fact was the question.

He heard her curse again the next room over, her heartfelt words wildly entertaining if physically impossible.

 _I love her,_ Ben realized, the thought sudden but not surprising. He mulled over the three words, a smile tugging painfully at his mouth. _I love her._

Caught up in the revelation, he missed the moment when the door opened. The words right after the fact, however, snared his attention and put him on guard.

“Rey, what the hell happened?” 

A woman’s voice, and she didn’t seem to be asking out of concern for Rey. 

“A ghost,” Rey replied flatly as he made his way into her suite. 

“Rey, ghosts don’t blow up houses,” the other woman replied with strained patience as Ben entered the room. “ _Ghosts_ don’t wreck lucrative contracts. You-”

She caught sight of Ben and broke off, her eyes briefly widening in shock before she regained her composure. “Mr. Solo.”

“Ms. Holdo.” He moved closer to Rey, who stood in the middle of the room, her arms crossed defensively over her chest. Her long sleeves and sweatpants covered the evidence of her own injuries, whereas the most dramatic of Ben’s was prominently on display. “Have you spoken with the others yet?”

“Not yet.” Holdo leaned back against the door, her gaze shifting between himself and Rey. “I generally check in with the team lead first, when something goes wrong.” Her gaze settled on Rey. “You never answered your phone.”

“I lost it in the house.” Rey looked a little embarrassed by that admission. “Somewhere on the second floor.”

“A house which is now ash,” Holdo huffed, some of her patience dissipating. “Do you realize how this is going to impact our reputation? Our _insurance?_ ”

She looked to Ben on the last words, clearly realizing that his visible injuries hadn’t been the result of some construction related incident. He opened his mouth to say _something_ that might appease her- an offer to pay the penalty listed in the contract that he doubtless owed anyway, at the very least. The fact that he still needed the money- his credit card balance, which had born the burden of his mother’s medical care in her last days, desperately required paying off- barely registered in his mind. 

“I quit,” Rey said before he could speak, and her two simple words visibly stymied Amilyn Holdo and stunned him into silence. 

“Excuse me?” she replied, looking as if she had never expected _that_ particular phrase from Rey. 

“You weren’t there,” Rey said quietly, her arms still crossed tightly over her chest. “You’ll never understand what happened. This isn’t a con, or some mass delusion brought on by carbon monoxide poisoning, or… or anything else.” With seeming effort she released her grip on herself. “Tell your insurance company that it was a gas leak and employee error, but that the employee is now an ex-employee. Surely that will satisfy them.”

“You can also tell them that I have no intention of pressing charges or making claims for my own medical bills,” Ben added, deciding that he might as well use Rey’s mark on him to their mutual advantage. Holdo didn’t need to know _who_ had attacked him, after all. 

Holdo frowned, mingled relief and concern creeping into her expression. “Rey, you’ve never given me cause to worry before-”

“I know.”

Holdo muttered something under her breath, running a hand through lilac tinted hair. “Fine,” she said unhappily. “But… you’re driving a company vehicle.”

Real sorrow briefly flashed over Rey’s face, but she nodded. “I’ll drop it off at the Durham location within the next few days.”

“Okay.” For a moment Holdo hesitated. “Good luck.”

And then she was gone, and Rey slowly moved to sit on the nearest chair.

“You know,” she said, her gaze thoughtful, “I think I’m most upset about the truck.”

“Rey-”

“Losing my visa is pretty bad, too.” She leaned to the side, resting her head in the crook of her arm on the table. “I’m not sure I can afford to live in England, now that I think about it. Though I’m very good at eating whatever is available, no matter how disgusting, so I might be at an advantage with Brexit just around the corner.”

“You are _not_ going back to England,” he said firmly, then amended, “Unless you actually want to.”

He could write in England, after all, and Bebe wouldn’t care where she lived as long as there were birds to watch out the window. 

“I’m not sure it matters,” she replied. “No one wants me there.”

“ _I_ want you.” He knelt in front of her, resting his hands lightly on her thighs. “I still feel it- this connection,” he said softly, his body thrumming at her very nearness. “Come with me. Let me give you a home, a wedding ring, the terrifying uncertainty of never knowing when a hurricane might come along and flood the entire house-”

She laughed a little, her head still pillowed on her arm. “Is that supposed to be an enticement?”

“More a fair warning than anything else.” Ben leaned in closer, stopping before he put any pressure on her knees. “Stay with me,” he murmured, feeling as if he were offering up his heart in his hands. “Please.”

“Huh,” she said softly after a long silence. Her next words were said so teasingly he couldn’t take offense. “I honestly expected a better proposal from a romance novelist.”

“Give me an hour and I’ll have you swimming in rose petals,” he replied with the beginnings of a smile. “Drowning in daisies.”

She chuckled again. “No need; I was kidding.” 

Rey sat up straight and carefully touched a finger just to the side of the cut on his cheek. “I injured you.” She drew her hand back and held it up when he started to speak, signaling that she had more to say. “I know, I know, but… but you’ll have to look at that for the rest of your life, and maybe one day you’ll look in the mirror and think… think badly of me.”

“Think badly of the woman who stepped between me and a very dangerous ghost?” he replied, more amused than miffed by her insinuation. “The woman who destroyed the most ghastly stained glass I’ve ever had the misfortune to see, and did it with a multi-tool? The woman who found out we were sharing dreams and didn’t immediately run screaming into the night?”

“I’m not known for running screaming from anything.” The corners of her mouth quirked up just a little. “More running _toward_ things, screaming optional.”

“The snarl was very sexy,” Ben assured her, delighting in the grin he received for those words. “As was watching you handle a hammer. I’m hopeless with tools.”

“But you can cook, or so you say.” 

“I’ll prove it to you.” 

She cupped his uninjured cheek in one hand, what uncertainty that remained in her expression waning when he leaned into her palm. “Let me think about it.” 

“Okay.”

“But I will come to Manteo with you.” Rey bit her bottom lip briefly, looking away from him. “After I take care of a few things in Durham.”

“Okay,” he said again, and gently pulled her down for a kiss. 

\- - -

Rey felt as if she had taken leave of her senses, but she couldn’t deny that the moment her makeshift plan had fallen into place her mind had gone _yes, yes, do that._

“It’s still not fair,” Rose said when Rey went to wish them a safe journey. “We tried to tell Holdo what happened, but she just talked soothingly about therapy.”

“It’s for the best,” Rey said with a shrug, and almost believed it. “You still have your jobs?”

“For the moment.” Finn put a stack of neatly folded shirts into a suitcase, whereas just a few feet away Poe crammed crumpled clothing into another bag. “We’re on leave for a month, though- not that I mind the break.”

“We’re going to head down to Tybee Island for a week.” Poe threw another shirt into his bag. “Want to come?” he asked, and for all his carelessness in packing his expression was one of serious concern. “Beer and too much fried food could be all yours.”

“No.” Rey traced an invisible pattern on the table, a slight, unbidden smile curving her lips. “I’m going to spend some time with Ben.”

And even if she had been walking away alone, she still wouldn’t have said yes- it was utterly clear that the three of them needed time for just themselves, and she loved them too much to intrude. 

She watched as they exchanged a look, pleased when some of the severity on Poe’s face disappeared. “Well, that’s all right, then,” Rose said warmly. “He’s solid.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Poe muttered with a smirk, and laughed when Rose tossed a pillow at him. “What? I’m not _wrong._ ”

They might no longer be her crew, Rey thought as she watched them playfully bicker, but she was fairly sure they were still her friends. That was enough.

\- - -

“Do you need any more aspirin?”

Beside him Rey shook her head, slumping in the passenger seat of his car. “I have to wait a few more hours,” she said with a yawn. The trip had been an uncomfortable one for her, he knew, but at no point had she said a word about it: not after driving her truck to Durham, or while transferring her own personal tools from the vehicle to her small apartment, or even when dropping off her car keys at her former office. She just moved a little more carefully than was her wont, her jaw firm. 

“I like the ocean,” she murmured after a moment, her gaze trained on the sunset-lit coastline. “I’ve always wanted to live by the water.”

“It has its charms.” He turned off the main road into his small neighborhood, driving past cozy houses with tiny lawns. “You’ll be able to see a bit of the water from the bedroom windows.”

“Good.” She seemed to be studying the houses avidly, a smile quirking her mouth. “I like this, too.”

He turned into his driveway, parking with relief in front of his own home. Like the other houses on the block it was nothing grand: just a solidly built bungalow, the white paint on the exterior a little bit weathered. It was his, though, and he loved it dearly. 

Judging by the gleam in Rey’s eyes she didn’t find the sight a disappointing one. “This is it?”

“This is it.” 

He stepped out of the car, something in him settling when he took in his first breath of crisp ocean air. _Home._

“So,” Rey said, circling the car to stand beside him. She looked softer, somehow, as if she too had settled into a calmer state in the last few seconds. “What do we do now?”

Ben could think of a number of things, some more practical than others. “I’m going to fulfill part of my promise,” he replied, taking her hand. “I’m going to light a fire and make some tea, and then later I’ll tuck you into bed.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “To sleep.”

“That sounds like a good plan.” She leaned into him a little, a strand of hair falling over her face. “Because honestly…”

“Sex sounds horrible right now?” he asked with a smirk, surprising her into a laugh.

“Not horrible, but very uncomfortable.” She rose to her toes and kissed him gently. “Thank you,” Rey added in a softer voice. “For bringing me home.”

He wanted to kiss her again on the spot, to wrap his arms around her and murmur his own thanks into her hair until he ran out of words, but the way she shivered in the cold breeze forestalled him. “Come inside, sweetheart,” Ben said instead. “Let’s warm you up.”


	14. home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIVE.
> 
> My thanks to everyone for your patience! For whatever reason this chapter had to go through three different rewrites before I finally stumbled on a version that worked. I hope you find it worth the wait.

It happened like this: fire consumed every bit of plaster and wood, racing along ceilings and greedily sucking in fueling oxygen with each window that shattered. 

“It’s beautiful, don’t you think?” Padmé said contentedly as she stood amidst the flames, feeling nothing herself but taking a certain amount of glee in the screams of her former captor. “I never realized just how grand a fire could be.”

“A true improvement.” Anakin pressed a kiss to her temple, one arm curved around her shoulders, and for the first time in decades his touch felt like more than just a shadow of the real thing. “Well said, my love.”

She inspected their surroundings, searching not what existed in the physical world but the boundaries seen only by their kind. For as long as she could remember those boundaries had been as impenetrable as steel. Now, in the red and gold glow of the fire, she could see them erode until they were as thin and meaningless as cobwebs. 

“Are you ready?”

Her son- her _son_ , her boy- smiled down at her, hands tucked in his pockets. “We still have Leia to find, after all,” Luke continued. “And Han. I think you’ll both like him.”

Around them the other ghosts began to fade away, stepping beyond the house to whatever waited beyond. Ben Kenobi lifted a hand in farewell before disappearing. “Yes,” Padmé answered, reaching up to touch Anakin’s hand where it rested on her shoulder. “Lead the way.”

And they stepped from the flames into the light, leaving Snoke wailing behind them.

\- - -

Ben woke naturally with the sun, and despite the early hour felt better rested than he had in weeks. 

_Not a surprise,_ he thought as he carefully rolled onto his side, trying to make as little noise as possible. Beside him Rey still slept, the covers almost pulled up over her head. She snuffled a little in her sleep, one hand shifting a bit on the sheets.

Ben was tempted to move closer and cuddle up with her, but he had a feeling she needed at least a few more hours of uninterrupted rest. Slowly he slid out of bed, wincing when his bare feet landed on the cold floor. After snagging a pair of socks and a sweater from the dresser, he padded out into the hall to fiddle with the thermostat. 

The comfort of familiar routine came back to him as he started a pot of coffee. His space, his kitchen, his home- if Bebe were winding around his feet it would seem just like any other morning, with the exception of the woman still slumbering in his bed. 

_Our bed_ , he thought with a quick grin. If Rey were willing he would happily switch over to a plural possessive pronoun. Their bed, their home, their shed in the back garden that maybe she would like using as a workshop…

“Our empty fridge,” he said with dry humor when he realized that there was of course no milk or creamer for their coffee. Grabbing a pen and pad of paper, he sat down to make a grocery list. They needed everything, at least according to his usual shopping list. Dairy, meat, greens, fruit… probably a few household items as well. 

When his phone vibrated he glared in its direction, then noted the name of the caller. 

“Hey,” he said quietly, phone tucked between shoulder and cheek. “How’s Beebs?”

Ruwee exhaled noisily in his ear, sounding angry and ill-rested. “ _Ben._ ”

“Before you yell at me,” he said in interruption, adding _crème fraîche_ to his list, “I’m back in Manteo and I’ve been very busy, so please take pity.”

There was a brief, weighty pause from her end of the line. “When did you get home?”

“Last night.” He smiled a little humorlessly in anticipation of her coming interrogation. “Could you bring Bebe? And some half and half, and maybe some pastries. I’d rather tell you this story in person.”

“Forty five minutes,” she growled, and hung up on him. 

By the time she arrived he had been working his way through his inbox for at least fifty minutes, deleting whatever seemed inconsequential with an unconcern he rarely showed. _Brush with death_ he thought a little wryly as he moved quickly toward the door before Ruwee’s banging could wake up Rey. 

Ruwee took in the new topography of his face with surprising stoicism. “Well,” she said slowly, Bebe mewing stridently from the carrier she held. 

“Still alive,” he replied with a kind of mocking gravity, and she shot him the bird. 

“Your daddy is a bastard, Beebs,” she said once the door was locked behind her. With exaggerated care she placed the carrier on the floor. “Ben, it’s been- _fuck_ , it’s been over two days since we last spoke. _Two days._ The only thing that kept me from driving down to Mustafar myself was the local news claiming there were no fatalities.”

He loosed Bebe from her cage, giving her the brief scritch she allowed before his favorite feline hissed and darted deeper into the house. “I’ve been busy. Did you bring the half and half?”

Ruwee rolled her eyes even as she held out a bag. “You are currently my least favorite person on this planet; explain.”

“Quiet,” he said, snagging the bag. “I have a guest.”

She straightened. “ _Really._ ” 

“Rey came home with me,” he explained as he led her into the kitchen. “Coffee?”

“I’m honestly amazed both of you survived,” Ruwee replied, her voice pitched low. “I-”

She stopped speaking abruptly, and when he looked back at her he found that she had a hand covering her eyes. “Ru?”

“God, the nightmares I’ve had,” she said in a ragged whisper, and he saw tears begin to trickle down her cheeks. “You’re my best friend, you idiot.”

And she was his oldest and best friend- practically his sister, as far as he was concerned. “Hey,” Ben said softly, pulling her into a hug. “Everything worked out, okay? I’m fine, everyone else is fine… I even met a few friendly family ghosts.” He tipped up Ruwee’s chin gently, and she dropped her hand to reveal more tears and signs of anxious sleeplessness that he should have recognized earlier. “You look just like Padmé.”

“Grandma mentioned that a time or two,” she said, breaking away from him to sit at the table. “You fucker.”

“I should have called,” he admitted, taking the seat closest to her. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” Ruwee leaned back in her chair, scrutinizing him. “So,” she said on a tired sigh, “what happened to your face?”

Ben considered his words carefully. “You know how that house messes with your head.”

“I am aware,” she said with desert-worthy dryness. “Does this have anything to do with that dream of mine?”

“Yes. I dodged.”

“Thank goodness for that,” she muttered. Bebe rubbed against her ankles, mewing stridently and giving Ben the kind of side-eye that told him forgiveness would take time or, at the very least, tuna. “Who did it?”

Ben extended his fingers to Bebe for a sniff, ignoring the question. 

“Ben.” Ruwee’s voice rose slightly. “Ben, did the woman currently sleeping in your bedroom try to kill you?”

“Well,” Ben said slowly, preparing himself to prevaricate, at the exact same moment that Rey said, “Yes.”

Both Ben and Ruwee turned toward the door where Rey stood, the sleeves of her overlarge sweatshirt covering her hands and her hair mussed. “I thought he was someone else,” Rey said, her words still sleep-tinged. “I don’t make a habit of wounding people, I swear.” 

Bebe, spotting a new mark with a grifter’s eye, trotted across the kitchen floor with a cajoling trill. Rey’s mouth quirked upward in a self-conscious smile as she stiffly sat on the kitchen floor, limbs folding with the halting movements of someone in pain. “He was very kind to invite me,” she said softly as injured fingertips trailed over Bebe’s fur. “And you,” she said to the cat, “aren’t you a beauty?”

Bebe twitched her feathery tail and collapsed onto Rey’s lap with the assurance of a beast who had never been denied anything, ever, in its entire life. 

Ruwee drummed her fingers on the table briefly, then pinned Ben with a look. “Coffee, I think,” she told him firmly. “For everyone.”

“Sweetheart, are you hungry?” he asked Rey as he fetched two more mugs from the cabinet. He resisted the urge to check over his shoulder as the silence stretched on uncomfortably- though truth be told, what felt like minutes was likely only seconds. 

“No,” Rey said finally, and even without looking he knew that was a lie. She cleared her throat, and when Ben finally did turn he saw that her head was bent as she stared fixedly down at Bebe. “I could leave?” she offered tentatively. “Maybe take a walk, or…”

“No.” Ben placed a mug on the table in front of his cousin, then knelt to place a second next to Rey. “I mean, unless you _actually_ want to take a walk,” he amended, realizing that maybe Rey would welcome a chance to escape. He grabbed his own mug before sitting on the floor, resting one hand on Rey’s knee. “Introductions are in order, I think. Rey, this is my cousin, Ruwee, who is only mad because I’m an idiot who never called her with an update. Ru, Rey was injured trying to protect me.”

“Just some bruises,” Rey murmured as she scritched under Bebe’s chin. 

“Hardly,” Ben muttered in reply, rolling his eyes. “He literally wiped the floor with you.”

Ruwee sighed, wrapping one hand around her mug. “I’m sorry,” she told Rey, who lifted her head in surprise. “He’s right.”

“I thought it actually was the house,” Rey admitted, the set of her shoulders relaxing slightly. “I didn’t see Ben, at that moment- I just saw Snoke.”

“That doesn’t surprise me at all.” Ruwee offered a small smile, looking almost embarrassed. “Let’s start again, if you don’t mind.” Leaving her coffee behind, she joined the other two on the floor. “My name is Ruwee Naberrie,” she said, extending her hand to Rey. “Thank you for trying to save my favorite cousin’s life.”

Rey accepted her hand, her expression one of relief. “Rey Jones. I’m sorry my handiwork will be marring your family portraits for the next fifty or so years.”

“Rey,” Ben began with a groan, only to be interrupted by a laugh from Ruwee. 

“It makes him look rakish, don’t you think? Like one of his heroes.” 

“You have a point,” Rey agreed, and aimed a teasing grin at him. “Put him in a billowy, half-unbuttoned shirt and he would be the perfect disgraced younger son turned pirate.”

“The broody kind that writes tortured poetry in his cabin.”

“And has a soft spot for the three-legged ship cat.”

“Thank you,” Ben said dryly, though he couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from quirking up at their jibes. “I’ll keep that in mind for a future book.”

Ruwee glanced at him, then back to Rey. “Why don’t we move to the living room?” she suggested, and though her words were casual he knew them for what they were: the managing type of care that Ruwee excelled in. Before Rey knew it she would likely be settled on the couch under a blanket, Bebe purring on her lap. “Ben, grab the donuts.”

“Bossy,” Ben said with a mock-sigh, and his cousin poked him lightly on the shoulder. 

“Move, Solo.”

\- - -

“So,” Rey said the evening of her first full day in Manteo, trying not to wince as she shifted her aching body. “What… what can I do to help?”

Ben looked up from the bottle of wine he was opening, his wound still uncomfortably livid on his face. “Rest,” he said firmly. “Whatever that means for you- though Bebe would love to have someone to pin down for most of the day, if you’d like to volunteer.”

“I can’t say resting is one of my strengths,” she admitted, leaning against the stretch of counter nearest him. “I don’t-”

Rey paused, trying to decide how to phrase her feelings. “I was often accused of being lazy, as a child.”

He left the wine key embedded in the cork and moved in front of her, placing his hands on the counter to either side of her hips. _Stay there,_ Rey thought as she looked up into his eyes, his proximity comforting. “I have a really hard time believing that,” Ben said quietly, his breath warm against her hairline. “I feel like little Rey was judged far too harshly.”

“Well,” she said slowly, one hand creeping up to rest against his flannel shirt, “I used to… I used to hide, sometimes, when they called.”

“If you hid from your guardians then there was a reason.” Ben moved a little closer, and with a quiet sigh she wrapped her arms around him, face pressed against his chest. “Rest for me, sweetheart? Give me the satisfaction of taking care of you, for a while.”

“You’re also injured,” she mumbled into his shirt, appreciating his gentle embrace even as she longed for a solid hug, bruises or no. 

“Yeah, but I can sit down without wincing.” 

“Not hiding that well, am I?” Rey asked with a sigh, the question more rhetorical than anything. The drive the day before had been hell, though she had bitten back every curse that tried to slip past her lips during her time as a passenger in Ben’s car.

“Sweetheart, your entire backside must be bruised. You probably shouldn’t be sitting down at all.”

She grumbled a little, taking the opportunity to rub the tip of her nose against the unmarred skin of his throat. 

“I’ll make it worth your while,” he murmured into her hair, his tone coaxing. “I can be very, very accommodating.”

Rey felt a blush prickle over her cheeks. “Is that what one of your heroes would do?” she asked lightly, continuing to hide her face against his chest. “Be accommodating?”

Odd how such a bland word could sound positively filthy coming from Ben. 

“Maybe it’s research,” he teased, slipping one hand gently over the curve of her ass. No pressure, just warmth. “I’ve been thinking about my next book, after all. What do you think of a bookish hero who writes Gothic romances under a pen name and a self-sufficient heroine skilled in restoration?”

Rey laughed a little, leaning back enough to meet his eyes. “Is she a commoner?”

“Not sure yet,” he admitted, staring down at her with a gentle, open expression. “I think she and her crew are quite popular among the fast set, though. Those rich young bucks inherit too much money, then she sweeps in and modernizes their mouldering family estates.”

“I like that idea.” She hooked one finger on his collar to keep him close, though he didn’t look like he was intending to move anytime soon. “Is that what she’s going to do for your bookish hero?”

“Oh, I think so.” He cupped her cheek, his thumb sweeping along her cheekbone. “He’s going to think she’s amazing.”

“She’s going to think the same of him,” Rey whispered. “She… she’s going to fall quite hard for him, I think.”

“Well, that’s good.” The caress of his thumb against her skin was enough in itself to make her breath come short, and having all of Ben’s attention centered on her compounded the issue. “He’s going to propose very early, you know,” Ben continued, a slight smile curving his mouth. “She probably won’t accept right away, but… it’s definitely an open and genuine offer.”

“She’s very, very tempted.” Easier to use third person pronouns, for this, but Rey knew neither of them were fooled by the small remove. “But she comes from nothing, you know. She’s probably some abandoned by-blow.”

“She’s not nothing to him,” Ben said softly. “She’s everything.”

Rey closed her eyes, leaning into his hand. “Okay,” she murmured, overwhelmed in the best possible way. “I’ll rest.”

“Good,” he replied, and without opening her eyes she could tell by his tone alone that he was pleased. “Good,” he said again, his lips brushing softly against her forehead. 

_I love you,_ Rey thought as he wrapped his arms around her again, his heart beating steadily away under her ear. _God, I love you._

\- - -

Ben had never made a habit of lying on the floor when perfectly respectable furniture was around, but when it became clear that Rey found the couch confining he gladly made a nest of blankets in front of the fireplace and joined her there.

“I like having the option of full arm movement,” she explained rather drowsily as she lay on her belly, one arm under her head. Her other hand lay between them. “And the heat is nice.”

Bebe trilled questioningly before settling over the backs of Rey’s knees, blinking lazily up at Ben. “Is she on any bruises?” he asked, reaching out to caress the cat’s head. 

“No.” Rey peeked up at him, a strand of hair falling over her eyes. “What will you do if I stay here for the next week?”

“Bring you tea and snacks.” He settled on his side next to her. “I happen to have a pile of ARCs from other writers, if you’re interested.”

“I am _very_ interested,” she replied with a gleam of what might have been low-key avarice in her eyes. “Get those a lot, do you?”

“Rather frequently.” With a sly grin he added, “My wife would get first choice of any and all books that enter the house.”

He saw a flash of her own grin before she hid her face in the blankets. “Resorting to bribery, are we?” she replied, the words muffled. 

“I prefer to call it transparency.” He slid one finger over the curve of her ear, from cartilage to delicate lobe. The pad of his fingertip brushed over the back of her simple stud earring. “What would make you feel comfortable, sweetheart?”

She shifted a little, her face still hidden from him. “I’m not- I’m not used to this kind of quick acceptance,” she finally murmured. “I earned my place with my crew through long days and beers after work, not uncanny dreams.” Rey moved her head and peeked at him again through her hair. “I’ve never wanted to stay somewhere more,” she admitted quietly. “I’ve never wanted another person like I want you, but I’ve been promised permanence before and it was always a lie.”

Ben slid his hand over hers. “Stay until you believe me, then,” he suggested, then added in uncertainty, “Unless I’m being pushy?”

Rey’s laugh was closer to a snort. “Ben, I would not be within fifty miles of you if I thought you were being a creep about this.” She aimed a smile that was both shy and pleased at him. “You are incredibly tempting.”

“Thank God,” he muttered, delighting in her quiet laugh at his words. “I’m going to stop, though. Out of politeness.” Ben settled his head in the crook of his own arm, his hand still over hers. “The offer is open for however long you want to consider it.”

“And in ten years if I’m still undecided on your living room floor…?”

“Then I’ll have had ten years of you.” He shrugged a little awkwardly. “Or if you go back to Durham, or England, or wherever- I don’t want to lose you, Rey.”

“I don’t want to lose you, either.” She met his gaze squarely. “Why is it the idea of ten years feels very, very possible?”

“Steadfast Solo, that’s me.”

She snickered, inching a little closer. “Immovable as stone, hmm?”

“Pretty much.” He tangled his fingers with hers. “Unless you want me to move out of your way.”

“Maybe I want to stand right next to you.”

“Resolute Rey?” he teased gently. “What a pair we would make. We would conquer galaxies.”

“Hah.” She sighed, slipping her hand free and turning it until they were palm to palm. “Ben.”

Rey said his name almost as if it were a prayer, and he murmured her name in return with a sweetness he barely recognized. “Rey.”

After a moment she whispered something into the blankets, then lifted her head and said clearly, “I love you.”

Ben sucked in a breath, overcome. “Say that again,” he urged her, closing what little space had been between them. “Please.”

“I love you.” Her expression was one of vulnerability, but still she smiled. “Very much.”

She gave a surprised laugh when he managed to finagle himself under her body, giggling a little as she settled herself comfortably on his chest. Bebe, disturbed from her perch, made an irritated noise and stalked closer to the fire.

“I love you, too.”

Her laughter faded, and the wide-eyed look Rey leveled on him made his heart ache, just a little. “I shouldn’t be so surprised,” she said after a moment, her voice soft. “Not many people propose when love isn’t a factor.”

Ben tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m a romantic at heart, sweetheart. It’s the Solo curse.”

She unexpectedly blushed. “Not a curse,” she murmured, settling her head on the uninjured side of his chest. “I like that part of you a lot, Ben.”

“Good.” He wrapped his arms loosely around her, feeling a little drowsy. This blanket nest was far more comfortable than he had expected. “Good.”

They napped together in front of the fireplace, one of Rey’s hands holding fast to his shirt.

\- - -

Rey was never one for half-measures, so once she resigned herself to a period of recuperation she gave herself over to it whole-heartedly- at least to a certain extent. She spent most of her time in the nest in front of the fire, voraciously reading her way through a pile of advanced reader copies while Bebe purred contentedly by her side, and every night she curled up in bed with Ben and explored just how creatively accommodating they could be.

In between, though, she still helped him prep meals, and she also insisted on lending a hand with light housework (even if he did grumble at the latter). And- when her fingertips had mostly healed, and she could move without feeling every muscle scream in protest- she dug Ben’s dusty toolbox out of the closet and began searching out the kind of minor issues that so often went ignored until they were actual problems. 

“You know you don’t have to do that, right?” Ben said when he caught her oiling door hinges. 

“I know,” she replied peaceably, a kind of contentedness stealing over her as she once again took up the tools of her trade. “But it’s nice, you know? To repair a building instead of tearing it apart.” She paused, and then for the first time said aloud what she had been mulling over in silence. “And… I think I’ve stripped my last house. Salvage no longer holds the attraction it once did.”

Rey slid him a glance, then added, “I’m ready to leave my mark on something, I suppose.”

_On this house,_ she almost said, but from the way his expression softened she knew that he didn’t need those words said aloud to understand her subtext. Every leveled door, every quiet step, every banished draft- her labor was the best way she knew how to turn his home into something shared. 

“Okay,” he said after a moment, leaning in to kiss her forehead. “Tea?”

Rey smiled as she returned her gaze to the hinge in front of her. “Please.”

\- - -

“Am I hurting you?”

Ben chuckled against Rey’s throat at her question, charmed by her breathy, worried tone. “No, sweetheart. I should be asking _you_ that question, I think.”

She squirmed in his grasp, a moan escaping her lips as his hand slipped between her legs. “No,” she managed shakily, “I’m good.”

“On a scale of one to ten,” he asked with a grin, “how accommodating am I being?”

“Eleven,” she gasped.

“Hmm.” He crooked the two fingers inside of her forward until she whined. “Tell me when I hit fifteen.”

\- - -

There was no one major turning point, no revelation: instead Rey simply woke up one morning and thought _home_ as easily and naturally as she might think _the sky is blue._ Stretching, she ran a hand over the cooling sheets on Ben’s side of the bed, a smile spreading over her face as she listened to the rain pattering against the windows, to the sound of his footsteps in the kitchen.

After a moment of drowsy contemplation she slipped out of bed, her body offering barely a twinge of protest as she moved. Padding across the floor in her socks, she opened the now-soundless door and walked down the hall and through the den, passing a snoozing Bebe.

Once at the threshold of the kitchen she didn’t hesitate. “Ben,” she said, her hair in a sloppy ponytail and the imprint of a pillowcase seam on one cheek, “do you still want to get married?”

He looked momentarily stunned, the potholder in his hand falling to the floor, and then a smile almost incandescent in its sheer joy spread over his face. _Yes,_ she thought, her turn to be dazed as he strode forward intently. _This is right, this is perfect, this is-_

Ben stopped just short of her, lifting his hands to cup her face. “You want to stay with me, sweetheart?” he asked quietly, his tone so tender she instinctively nuzzled into one palm. 

“Terribly.” Her hands settled on his chest, worn cotton soft under her fingertips. “I want to spend a ridiculous number of nights curled up in front of your fireplace with you and your cat,” Rey said, leaning into him. “I want to help you board up the windows before we evacuate for hurricanes, and then spend days afterward fixing every single problem when we return.” 

“Really?” he asked, that smile still dazzling her. “That’s a lot of work.”

“It’s our home, isn’t it?” she said in reply, less a question than a statement. “I don’t care how much work it takes.”

He bent until his lips were almost on hers, joy shifting to the kind of intensity that made her quiver. “Sweetheart, how are you feeling?”

“Very well, considering my back is still a mottled kind of yellow,” she answered, the unsteadiness in her voice born of anticipation. She had patiently waited for skin to knit and muscles to heal, for bruises to fade and the lingering shock to subside, and she didn’t regret it- but now she wanted everything. “Come back to bed with me,” she urged, one hand clutching his shirt.

“Tired of me merely being accommodating?” he asked in a low, teasing tone. 

“Not at all.” She nuzzled her cheek into his palm again. “I just want you to follow through with the rest of your promise.”

To her surprise- and displeasure- Ben pulled back. “Do you want a big wedding?” he asked unexpectedly.

Rey blinked, irritation washing away. “I was more thinking we could seal the deal today or tomorrow, but-”

She saw a flash of his grin before he caught her in a kiss, that excellent mouth cutting her off mid-sentence. “Going to put a ring on your finger,” he murmured after kissing her near-breathless, his lips brushing against hers as he spoke. “Then I’m going to take my wife to bed and be very, _very_ thorough.”

Rey found that she liked the sound of that quite a bit. For that ridiculously romantic notion she could be patient for just a little longer. “Pinky swear?” she asked in a whisper, going up on her tip-toes to chase his mouth as he straightened.

A sweetly wicked smile appeared on his face. “Pinky swear.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just the epilogue to go!


	15. epilogue: time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My lovely readers, thank you all SO MUCH for coming along on this spooky and sometimes weird journey. I cannot express how much I appreciate your many encouraging comments.

A deed was such a small thing. 

Ben tossed aside the envelope and pressed the papers in front of him flat on the table. Just a copy of the registered document, not the original: that was even now winging its way to the conservancy group that had purchased the land despite his questionably legal bout of arson. 

(“Your land,” Sheriff Mothma had said with a shrug after interviewing him. She had aimed a knowing look at the smoldering remains of the house, then added, “It’s for the best.”)

But then, he thought with a humorless smirk, forty-three acres of virgin land was probably quite the draw.

“It’s registered?” 

Rey stepped up beside him, a note of relief in her words, and his smirk softened into a genuine smile when she tucked herself against his side. He looked away from the deed long enough to brush a kiss over her damp hair. 

“It’s done,” he confirmed, returning his attention to the document and tracing a finger over the grantor block. _Benjamin J. Solo_ , read the neat type, _and Rey Solo, f/k/a Rey Jones._ “It’s really, truly done.”

She wrapped an arm around his waist, leaning into him. “Good.” 

Ben hesitated, worry niggling at his mind, then added, “Do you think…?”

He let the question trail off, and for a long moment there was silence between them. 

“I think this is no longer our problem,” Rey said finally, quietly. “Even if a scrap of him is still there… what more could we have done?”

“Beside salting the earth?” Ben muttered.

She placed her left hand over the deed, sapphires and gold gleaming in the light. “Our family is done with that place.” She still spoke quietly, but her voice was firm. “Our children will never step foot on that land.”

He released a held breath, doing his best to push away the lingering sense of guilt. “I know.”

“They know what they bought,” Rey continued. “They knew before the papers were signed. Their disbelief isn’t on us.”

“I know,” he said again. “One day I’ll even believe it.”

Her mouth quirked upward in a small smile. “You’d better.”

Ben tenderly picked up her left hand with his right, placing a kiss in the well of her palm. “I love you, sweetheart.”

“I know.” Rey held his gaze, her serious mien gentling. “I love you, too.”

He took his wife back to bed, and it was only later- much later- that Ben filed the deed away in a folder labeled _Mustafar_ , and there it stayed.

\- - -

Seasons passed, and as they did the small house in Manteo remained sound and only pleasantly weathered. The chimney stayed clear and vented woodsmoke through crisp autumns, cold winters, and damp springs. When hurricanes struck the roof held firm and the floodwaters shied away from the foundation. “Luck,” the neighbors liked to say with a chuckle and perhaps a little envy, but the Solos were so generous with their time and labor after every storm that they couldn’t really bring themselves to begrudge the couple’s good fortune. 

“Your family… they’ve put a little bit of themselves into this house, haven’t they?” Rey murmured to Ben one night after the third storm, and with a nod he pulled her closer as Bebe jumped onto the foot of the bed. 

Seasons passed, and the dedication pages of Ben’s books took on a theme:

_For Rey. I love you._

_For Rey, because you dared me._

_For Rey._

Seasons passed, and the Solo family grew by one. 

“Perfect,” Padmé said softly as she looked down into the bassinet. Her great-granddaughter, barely two days old, gave a high-pitched cry. 

“She has his ears,” Leia noted mistily as Ben jolted out of bed and turned on the light, the concern of a new father written across his face. “And he was born with hair just like that.”

They watched as Ben gathered his daughter carefully in his arms, as a half-awake Rey joined him. 

“They’re going to be fine,” Padmé said with a satisfied smile as Rey settled in the padded rocker with the infant, Ben kneeling at her feet. “Just fine.”

Seasons passed.

“Tell me a story,” Breha begged one evening at bedtime, her favorite stuffed animal clasped in her arms. Bebe was curled up beside her, an orange and white puddle on the purple bedding. “Just one more, _please._ ”

“One more,” Ben agreed, baby Anna blinking sleepily in the crook of his arm. He hid his grin as Rey chuckled beside him, knowing that she would tease him later for caving so easily. Resting his free hand on his wife’s knee, he considered which story to tell- and his gaze landed on Bebe. 

His choice made (a brave cat, an adventurous little girl, a happy ending), he began.

“It happened like this.”


End file.
